Cold War 2.0?

Is a tempting alternative to western democracy gaining currency in the developing world? So I wondered when I read the warning in yesterday's Times by Mohamed Keita, Africa advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, of growing media suppression across Africa:

As Africa’s economies grow, an insidious attack on press freedom is under way. Independent African journalists covering the continent’s development are now frequently persecuted for critical reporting on the misuse of public finances, corruption and the activities of foreign investors. ...

Keita attributes the trend in large part to

the influence of China, which surpassed the West as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Ever since, China has been deepening technical and media ties with African governments to counter the kind of critical press coverage that both parties demonize as neocolonialist.

Fighting the elite tide

The power of elites is like entropy.  A robust society can keep inherited or socially acquired privilege in check for a season or six, but eventually the elites learn a trick too many. Life is a failing of the wing, said Marcus Aurelius, and that goes for societies too.

Cheering rejoinder: societies have very long life cycles, and democracy is a fountain of youth, or rather of regeneration.  When elites kill the golden goose, democracies self-correct -- cf. FDR from the left, and Thatcher from the right.

Question of the extended hour for the U.S.: can a democracy kill its own capacity for self-correction? E.g., by Citizens United, or by acclimating its citizens to torture as an entrenched instrument of "national security", or by a media establishment that debases public discourse, or by some tidal pull we don't yet fully understand toward ever-increasing income inequality?  There is a battle brewing between remaining democratic antibodies and the instruments of elite entrenchment that have built up since Reagan was elected.

A President confesses error and defends democracy

Let's say that you were a supporter of Barack Obama in 2008, now disillusioned. You credit the main thrust of the liberal brief against him and discount administration defenses. You believe that  the 2009 stimulus was too small and too tax-heavy (and that a decisive leader could have put through a much more effective package), that the healthcare reform process took way too long (and that decisive leadership could have radically foreshortened it), that the President was eighteen months late in refocusing on jobs and let Republicans set the agenda, and that he got disastrously rolled in the debt ceiling deal.  Should you then write him off as a failure, a disaster for Democrats and the country, a man unequal to the challenges of his historical moment?

No. All presidents err terribly. They err in emphasis, in tactics, and in overall direction.  Theodore Roosevelt said he would be happy if he made the right decision 55% of the time.  You have to weigh the successes against the failures (and the politically possible against the ideal) and determine which way the scales tip -- perhaps slightly.  And given Obama's tendency to favor long-term priorities over short, you might have to wait a year or decade or two before making an assessment.

In a recent post, I noted that FDR not only tipped the U.S. into a brutal recession by cutting spending in 1937, as Krugman and others have been reminding us for years, but reversed course only halfheartedly and rather ineffectually -- both because of his own ambivalence about deficit spending and because he had squandered political capital on his court-packing scheme and a war on conservative Democrats. Moving the story along: by early 1939, the economy was perking up because the war machine was starting to crank.  Roosevelt gave a memorable State of the Union address. I it, he implicitly confessed to two major errors over the previous several years -- though he cast those errors as collective ones, which they also were.

A warning about Pakistan

This cry of anguish and warning in the FT by Aatish Taseer, son of the recently assassinated governor of Punjab in Pakistan, is infused with personal grief and may be overstated (pray it's so), but it's so forcefully written that you can feel your world view wanting to shift as you read:

Let us be clear about what happened last week: Osama bin Laden was not just found living in Abbottabad, there out of some inverse logic of his own. He was found in this garrison town because he was the guest of the army. And now the charges against this army and its agencies are manifold

They range from duplicity in Afghanistan, both aiding the Americans and their adversaries, to a rich trade in nuclear technology with the world's worst countries, to - as senior members of the Indian establishment have claimed - helping to plan and execute the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Pakistan's neighbours - India and Afghanistan - are hoarse in the throat from repeating that it is the Pakistani army that is the source of jihad in south Asia...   [snip]

"Your train, The End of History, is operating 15-20 years late. We apologize for any inconvenience."

I've often pushed back against those who mock Francis Fukuyama for having suggested, in the wake of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, that the world was heading toward universal embrace of democracy and capitalism and that there was no serious ideological alternative.

I've long suspected that Fukuyama was not wrong, just early, and not even necessarily early, since he never suggested that The End of History was immediately at hand (not in the book version, anyway; perhaps he was less equivocal in the original article) -- just that we were on course for it.  I still like to think he's essentially right, with three caveats, two old, one new, or morphed out of the old.

First: who knows what malign new ideology may arise, command the allegiance of fanatics and proceed to enslave hundreds of millions or billions. I don't think Islamist theocracy qualifies; it's a rearguard action, without a prayer of building or catching hold of a world power -- though it could, through major terrorist attacks, destabilize current powers and perhaps, given our proven propensity to panic over the past ten years, end democracy in America. Which leads to a second caveat: never underestimate humanity's capacity to tear civilization down; chaos or destruction through war or environmental depredation is always possible.

The third caveat is prompted by China's sustained ability over 30+ years to manage rapid economic growth via top-down, autocratic rule. This leads to a revisionist thought: what if the Cold War, or at least the ideological competition underpinning it, never really ended?  As the Soviet Union collapsed and China progressively took the wraps off private enterprise, an assumption took hold in the west that "communism" was an empty ideological shell, that Chinese society, now that it allowed private enterprises to create and accumulate wealth, was essentially capitalist, and that capitalism ultimately entailed democracy.

But the Chinese Communist Party is no empty shell. Is its ideology? I imagine that party members consider "communism" a living ideal, in the sense that the Party, endowed with the the responsibility of ensuring the greatest good for the greatest number, continues to manage an enormous national economy to the overall benefit of the society as a whole (regardless of large groups that get dispossessed or disadvantaged when they're in development's path).  China's rulers have delivered the performance to give such a claim credibility.  The state, moreover, still controls the means of production to the extent necessary to build public infrastructure, dominate major industries, and to control banking in such a way as to prioritize development in particular sectors. Who is to say that this system is not "communist"?

In an op-ed in today's Financial Times, Fukuyama himself acknowledges that China has found itself to a so-far stable (though "sui generis") political-economic system that is unlikely to transition to democracy any time soon. He credits Chinese leaders not only with being able "to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well," but to be quite sensitive, in their way, to "popular discontents." He sees a durable social contract between the ruling party and current and rising elites:

"The electorate is smarter than all of us?" Lincoln said it better...

At her 77th birthday dinner last night, my mother asked me if I still believe the dictum that's always been on my profile to the right on this page, that "the electorate is smarter than all us." I had to say no.  That is, it's an oversimplification. I will take it down or modify it when I put up my next post.

The idea first formed itself when I read Stephen Ambrose's biography of Eisenhower in the mid-90s and it occurred to me that while I would never have voted for Eisenhower, the country was wise to.  With some hesitation, I extended the thought to Reagan, and to Bush Sr. (reasoning here).

More broadly: throughout American history, notwithstanding long periods of drift and poor governance, the electorate has periodically empowered great leaders to embark on  major course corrections.  I never believed that the electorate never makes mistakes -- simply that, in the broad sweep of history, it enables corrections when they become necessary. 

I hold to all that, except maybe the Reagan part (I credit his flexible and creative response to Gorbachev, but I also think that his denigration, defunding and denaturing of federal government agencies by appointing frauds and shills like Clarence Thomas and James Watt had disastrous consequences).  And I still think that democracy remains the worst form of government except for all the alternatives because in the long run the people will hold leaders accountable for decisive failures of policy or execution -- as they did to Hoover, Carter, and ultimately Bush Jr.

Too big to jail? Can the U.S. prosecute an ex-President?

Should democratically elected leaders be tried for war crimes if there's reasonable cause to believe they may have committed them?

Michael Walzer of Princeton surveys 350 years of killing kings (and hanging Nazis) and concludes: almost certainly not. Reviewing the conditions under which past regimes have put their predecessors or war opponents on trial and executed them, he notes that all constitute radical rejection of the deposed or defeated enemy -- i.e., that trials occur after regime change (obviously enough -- in a way, Walzer seems to see his mission as laying bare what should be obvious). Democracies,Walzer argues, are different -- and the consequences of treating the policy decisions of predecessors as criminal are dangerous.

Walzer issues a warning that should be brooded on seriously. But he draws conclusions that even he is uncomfortable with, and that in my view should be repudiated.

Here is the warning:

we should think very carefully before we do anything that raises the stakes of democratic politics—and putting your opponents on trial after they lose an election would certainly raise the stakes. There is a narrowly prudential argument against doing that (in addition to the broader prudential argument that I have been making): if we raise the stakes for them, they can raise the stakes for us. Paraphrasing Saint-Just, we might say that nobody can rule innocently: there will always be reasons for a trial. There will always be political maneuvers or policy decisions that violate the law or that can be made to look as if they violate the law. And once the game gets serious in that way, anyone holding office would have a very strong incentive to do whatever was necessary to win the next election. Winning some and losing some would then look like a fool’s politics. It would be very dangerous, I think, to start down this path.

A "consensus" sans democracy?

Katrin Bennhold reports in the International Herald Tribune  (as noted today by Thomas Friedman):

And as developing countries everywhere look for a recipe for faster growth and greater stability than that offered by the now-tattered “Washington consensus” of open markets, floating currencies and free elections, there is growing talk about a “Beijing consensus”...

Some suggest that China’s lack of democracy is an advantage in making unpopular but necessary changes. “It is more challenging for democratic systems because every day they come under public pressure and every short period they have to go back to the polls,” said Victor Chu, chairman of First Eastern Investment Group in Hong Kong, the largest direct investment firm in China. “China is lucky to have the ability to make long-term strategic decisions and then execute them clinically.”

During the last great crisis of Western capitalism, many people felt the same way about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.  The current Chinese government is a far more rational and accountable steward of the common weal than either of those monstrosities.  But I imagine that the advantages of dictatorship will eventually once again prove illusory -- or more accurately, the costs of repression will in the fullness of time be revealed to outweigh the benefits, and democracy will emerge once again as the worst form of government except for all the alternatives. As Gideon Rachman observed this past fall, the Chinese government relies currently relies on a social contract that will likely at some point show its fragility:

The government’s neurotic obsession with achieving its totemic figure of 8 per cent growth a year hints at the country’s continuing political fragility. Without a democratic mandate, the Communist party relies on rapid growth to keep the system stable. Somehow the country needs to make the transition to a system in which the government can draw upon alternative sources of legitimacy. Twenty years after the Tiananmen massacre, the Communist party shows no outward sign of contemplating a transition to a more democratic system. Meanwhile, the Chinese media speculate openly that social unrest could rise to dangerous levels, if economic growth slackens.

As the government moves now to "clinically" put the brakes on an overheating economy, here's hopeful for managable crises, and peaceful transformations.

Autocracy, inflation, revolt, crackdown

A few weeks ago, social scientists Michael J. Lamia and James Raymond Vreeland published the results of an exhaustive statistical study of the factors that lead countries to transition to democracy. One ostensibly surprising conclusion was that rapid GDP growth does not correlate with such transitions:

Regarding transitions to democracy, we find that economic growth has a robust negative effect. This finding, standing in stark contrast to modernization theory, suggests that autocracies with strong economic performance are unlikely to see democracy emerge. Instead, economic contraction causes dictatorships to break down. Also in contrast to modernization theory...the level of GDP per capita does not have a robust relationship with the emergence of democracy (p.2).

We have an interesting finding for economic growth: it makes dictatorships more likely to survive and lowers the chances for democracy to emerge (p. 27).

Is this really so surprising? No one wants to change a winning game. As long as an autocracy delivers the goods, people are likely to tolerate it. However, these researchers also found that

autocracies with strong economic performance are unlikely to see democracy emerge. Instead, economic contraction causes dictatorships to break down.

What happens when rapid economic progress gives way to economic stress? Perhaps that is the danger point for many autocracies.

Such was the case in the runup to the Tiananmen Square crackdown in China in 1989. From 1984-1988, China's average yearly growth rate (not compounded) was 12.1%, according to Chinability. In 1989, growth slowed to 4.1%, shrinking to 3.8% the next year before soaring again to 9.2% in 1991 and never dipping below 7% thereafter. The major economic stress point in the months prior to the student protests, however, was runaway inflation, which led to widespread calls for increased centralized control of the economy after a period of liberalization.

The Chinese people ultimately accepted continued authoritarianism after the Tiananmen crackdown. Prior to the 1989 dip, they had experienced a dozen years of extraordinary growth, and after a two-year slowdown in 1989-90 the country resumed its torrid wealth creation. Some may lament the wealth-freedom tradeoff. But the government has credibility to the extent that it's fostered the commonwealth for a generation.

Iran's current crisis is also occurring at a moment of economic pressure following a period of growth. Since 2000, according to the Congressional Research Service, GDP growth has averaged about 6.4% per year; this year, in the midst of the world financial crisis, it's projected at 3.5%. But again, the chief stressor is inflation: the official CPI was 17.1% in 2007 and 28.0 in '08, the real rate is higher, and the costs runups hit people where they live, in housing and food prices. Unemployment is also high - 12.1% in 2007 -- and Iran suffers the world's biggest brain drain, according to the IMF, as its young population goes abroad in search of opportunity.

Unlike the Chinese in 1989, Iranians today widely consider their country to be mismanaged economically. Ahmadinejad has held interests rates artificially low, fueling inflation. The international sanctions bite, and foreign investment is low.

A Tiananmen-style crackdown could happen at any time in Iran. But the Iranians have less cause to accept their government's heavy hand than the Chinese did. There is no upside to acquiescence -- no promise of prudent economic stewardship, or of stability and increasing foreign engagment.

Homo electus and the last election

A remarkable Times article today documenting improvement in race relations in the U.S. since Obama's election also bears witness to the power of democratic participation as an expression of human nature:

“I didn’t vote for Obama,” said Chris Miller, 46, a boat builder in Johnstown, N.Y., who is white. “But just what I saw during the campaign — you had people, white, black, yellow, green, gray, every race and nationality out there together supporting that man. That right there showed me, hey, things are changing, things are better here. I had never seen anything to that extent.”

Alan Ingram, 29, a Web site designer in Milwaukee, agreed. “People had more of an opportunity to get together with this election and all of its events,” said Mr. Ingram, who is black. “You literally saw people of all kinds of backgrounds finding common ground.”

In a cafe on Friday, Mr. Ingram struck up an easy conversation with Nicole Nelson, a white law student, who agreed with his assessment.

“I went to an Obama rally, and I saw everything,” Ms. Nelson said. “I voted for him despite being brought up with conservative, small-town values in a place that had no diversity. I think it was a matter of exposure that changed how I looked at life.”

Color me a sap: that gives me chills.

There are good democrats (small "d," as in believers in democracy) who are what you might call minimalist democrats, of the school that "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the alternatives." According to this school, democracy is necessary because no one can be trusted with power, everyone must be held accountable. This skepticism about human nature is fundamental to all democratic - and indeed, Republican - theory and underpins the U.S. Constitution with its separation of powers.

But is democracy's chief virtue negative - a check against corruption of power? A more expansive view is that political participation makes us fully human, and that democracy provides the opportunity for such participation to all. According to Aristotle, "man is by nature a political animal"; the political community, as the most developed social unit, is the ultimate expression of human nature, and "the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society." Democracy provides the opportunity and responsibility to all adults to participate in "the administration of justice."

Perhaps the ultimate reason that Obama won is that he communicated this understanding of democracy. As, for example, in the Jan. 5, 2008 debate:

And, you know, so the truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

We had an election last year that riveted the nation, that revived and elevated political discourse, that generated a fresh drive toward a more perfect union and in itself changed this nation for the better.

Further, if human beings are essentially social animals, and if politics is the highest form of social interaction (plenty of room for debate there, I know..), and if our politics ultimately changes our values and our behavior, then we may actually be driving our own evolution through political action. Call us homo electus.

Defining democratization down

The Times today, noting the congruity of realist outlook between Obama and Robert Gates, credits Gates with bringing Obama "to earth" on goals for Afghanistan. Gates, according to Eliabeth Bumiller, has a "discomfort with lofty democracy rhetoric":

“If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” Mr. Gates recently told Congress.

The remark ricocheted around the city as a startling break from the second President Bush, but it was also a departure from Mr. Obama’s comments during the campaign when he spoke grandly of rebuilding Afghanistan’s civil institutions. Friends say that Mr. Gates’s thinking may have been a factor in bringing Mr. Obama’s goals down to earth or at the very least that there was a meeting of minds.

“Who got there first, I don’t know,” said Lee Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, “but they really have sought a kind of middle ground between making Afghanistan a model of democracy and stability on the one hand, and a slide into chaos on the other.”

Something is slightly off here. Obma may have spoken soaringly of the need to focus U.S. military efforts on Afghanistan, away from Iraq, and broadly about the need to win the war for hearts and minds in the Muslim world, but did he wax eloquent about creating a model democracy? I don't think so. In fact, as I've noted before, Gates defining success down from Bushian heights in Afghanistan sounds almost exactly like Obama doing the same with regard to Iraq. Here's Gates on Afghanistan this January:

I think one of the -- one of the points where I suspect both administrations come to the same conclusion is that the goals we did have for Afghanistan are too broad and too far into the future, are too future-oriented, and that we need more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years in terms of reestablishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after alQaeda, preventing the reestablishment of terrorism, better performance in terms of delivery of services to the people, some very concrete things.

And Obama on Iraq, to Ryan Crocker, last April:

And, see, the problem I have is if the definition of success is so high, no traces of Al Qaida and no possibility of reconstitution, a highly-effective Iraqi government, a Democratic multiethnic, multi- sectarian functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not of the kind that we don't like, then that portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.

If, on the other hand, our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an Al Qaida base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable timeframe, and that, I think, is what everybody here on this committee has been trying to drive at, and we haven't been able to get as clear of an answer as we would like.

It's a meeting of realist minds.

The Gray Lady's Fainting Spell

The New York Times editorial board is shocked, shocked that some Obama supporters say they would sit out the general if Hillary is the nominee, and that some Republicans would rather lose the White House than see McCain win. "That is not the way democracy is supposed to work," they intone.

This is a head-scratcher. Does the Times board think that lockstep party unity is "the way democracy is supposed to work"?

Reality check: many Americans of all political stripes have long said they would not vote for Hillary under any circumstances; the Dem primaries are drawing record turnouts; every second debate has been a lovefest; Democratic voters as a body seem ecstatic with the choice between two strong candidates; and in the runup to Super Tuesday, huge numbers of voters were undecided almost down to the wire. Americans as a whole seem euphoric about the way democracy is working this season.

True that there's a real risk now that Hillary and Obama will damage each other as competition grinds on. Billary may be tempted to get Rovian again, and Obama has been increasingly explicit and specific in arguing that Hillary is part of the country's metapolitical problem and therefore can't build the kind of working majority that he can. But as dday has pointed out, this has been a relatively restrained primary battle so far.

Why is the Times wringing its hands over the animosities inevitably stirred by a competitive race? Is their craving for a Hillary cakewalk stronger than Hillary's own?

Related posts:
Obama's Metapolitics
Obama and Hillary: March 2003
When Hillary went MIA on Iraq
Return of the Clintonian Repressed
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something
Obama Praises Clinton, and Buries Him

In his "Think Again" blog, Stanley Fish relayed some of his responses to 10 questions posed by a BBC interviewer for a series titled "Why Democracy"? As usual, Professor Fish was interesting and inconsistent.

Beginning with his definition of democracy, Fish says:

I tend to resist romantic definitions that feature phrases like “noble ideal” and opt instead for something more analytic: democracy is a form of government that is not attached to any pre-given political or ideological ends, but allows ends to be chosen by the majority vote of free citizens.

Shortly afterward, riffing on democracy's potential for undermining itself, Fish notes:

It is always possible that those who gain control of the legislative process will pass laws that erode or even repeal the rights – of property, free expression and free movement – that distinguish democracies from theocracies and monarchies.

And with regard to terrorism:

The danger is not so much that terrorists will defeat democracies by force as it is that, in resisting terrorists, democracies will forgo the procedural safeguards (against warrantless detention, censorship and secret surveillance) that make a democracy what it is.

Laudable warnings -- but how do they square with Fish's limited definition of democracy? Technically, democracy is defined by the vote. But it cannot survive long without a legal and constitutional architecture that distributes rather than concentrates power. Otherwise, the vote will be undermined, as in Russia today.

Fish's limited definition of democracy precludes his engaging the deepest questions regarding democracy’s potential for continuing to improve the human condition. For example, he writes off the question, "can democracy solve climate change?" as a "category mistake":

Solving the problems of climate change, if it can be done, will be a matter of advances in technology and alterations in personal and corporate behavior in response to state directives and regulations. No political system is either naturally suited to the task or barred by definition from performing it. Politics and technology are independent variables.

If Fish thinks that "alterations in personal and corporate behavior in response to state directives and regulations" happen in a vacuum, he should take a look at environmental regulation in China today -- where the central government mandates, and the nation's factories ignore with the collusion of local governments. Or look at the sewage pits that the Soviet Union and eastern Europe were revealed to be after communism collapsed.

Far from being 'independent variables," politics and technology are interdependent. That's not to say that authoritarian and even totalitarian societies make zero technological progress. But over time, they've been outperformed by freer societies -- by democracies in the period that democracy has existed. Fish may dislike Frances Fukuyama's 'teleological' argument (In The End of History and the Last Man) that human society as a whole is moving inexorably toward democracy. But Fukuyama's argument is evolutionary -- that sheer competitive pressure in the economic sphere drives countries toward democracy, because only democracy creates the conditions of free inquiry and a rule of law protecting economic rewards for those who innovate in the practical sphere. Authoritarian societies can ride piggyback in today's global economy and make economic progress for a while. But over time, they will either regress or democratize.

The question of whether democracy can cope with climate change, far from being a category mistake, cuts to the heart of democracy's (and humanity's) ability to adapt and thrive. Because democracy is founded on persuasion and a contest of wills, there's something counterintuitive about its often-proven ability to effectively cope with problems that demand a mobilization of will and resources. When fascism was on the rise, and again in the cold war, many 'tough-minded' observers felt that democracy could not compete effectively with societies marching under a totalitarian banner. They were wrong.

My own feeling is that democracy alone can cope with the toughest challenges facing humanity -- but only if democracies do not destroy their own workings in the ways outlined by Professor Fish, e.g. -- by voting away the people's empowerment through the erosion of civil liberties -- and also by allowing the destruction of checks and balances on the distribution of power.