Saturday, September 25, 2004

 

Not just "democracy" for Iraq

By The Erudite Redneck

“Democracy” isn’t necessarily the answer to authoritarianism in Iraq.

“Liberty” is what we should be promoting, and that’s a different thing from “democracy.”

Liberty is freedom from the “arbitrary use of power,” as Fareed Zakaria put it in his recent (2003) book on this very subject, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

Note the subtitle: Illiberal democracy … There is such a thing. In fact, Zakaria argues that illiberal democracies have become the norm -- something that's lost on most people in this country.

That’s the problem with the United States pledging to export democracy. Democracy is a tool, a vessel. That’s all. A democracy is what you make of it.

Democracies can run amok – and run against freedom, becoming arbitrary powers in themselves. A lynch mob is a democracy! And people who are afraid aren’t worth a damn at governing themselves in a democracy. Here’s an example from my studies this morning:

It’s 1534. Munster. The Lutherans are fixing to whip the Catholics for control of the free city in Germany. An offshoot of the Lutherans, a particularly radical strain of Anabaptists – who expect the Second Coming of Christ any minute, and who are willing to take up the sword to set up the New Jerusalem to usher Him in -- swoop in. The Lutherans, in some confusion, consider them allies.

IN MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS, the people of Munster, because they’re scared to death of the fighting in their midst and because they are further swayed by the end-times preaching, turn over the city government to the Anabaptists, who immediately start to dismantle the constitutional structure of the city. Lutherans and Catholics set aside their own differences and agree to a cease fire between them, so they can together fight the Anabaptists.

Jan Matthisz, the genius who leads this ELECTORAL takeover of Munster, gets himself killed trying to fend off the Lutheran-Catholic besiegers. John of Leyden steps in to fill the power vacuum at the top and sets up a kingdom based on a fairly twisted eschatology involving polygamy and communal ownership of all property – oh, and capital punishment, that is, by killing anyone who opposes him. The “kingdom” fell, but not without massive bloodshed.

A democracy without all the checks and balances our Founding Fathers miraculously put in place is a dangerous thing. So, the United States’ pledge to export “democracy” should only be part of the program.

First, we have to foster respect for the rule of law – that’s what makes democracy work, and to be fair, I think that’s what the people actually on the ground in Iraq are trying to do, God love ’em.

Our president, however, since he boasted once that he doesn’t read newspapers, and who probably didn’t read too deeply in the history books at Yale – Bush took a history degree from Yale in ’68, when I’m pretty classes were taught on a pass-fail basis -- probably really does think that “democracy” is all that’s required.

No! Rule of law. A constitution. A viable court system. Not democracy alone.

The Bill of Rights itself is a check on democracy. There are good reasons for it. If most of you want to take away my guns, you can't. If most of you want to shut down a newspaper because you disagree with it, you can't. If most of you think we should get out of Iraq, you'll have to wait -- because of checks on the power of "most of you," even though you would be a majority, and the majority is supposed to rule in a democracy, right?

U.S. Senators were appointed by state legislatures, not popularly elected, until a constitutional amendment in 1913 – and even today, with each state sending two senators to Washington regardless of population, the Senate is the least “democratic” of the two houses if what you’re talking about is everybody’s vote being equal to everyone else’s, which is usually what we think we mean when we talk about “the rule of the people.” There are good reasons for it.

The appointment of judges is antidemocratic. There are good reasons for it, despite some excesses. Judges are appointed partly as a check against runaway democracy.

Presidential appointment of cabinet officers, and gubernatorial appointments to boards and commissions – NOT democratic. There are good reasons for it.

There are many other checks on democracy that make this country what it is. We have general liberty, more or less, as Zakaria points out, because by “restricting our democracy we enhance our freedom.”

Lord help us if we install a “democracy” in Iraq, like the electoral system in Munster 470 years ago, that falls into the hands of religious fanatics. But how can it not, considering what, and who, we have to work with?

And if it's really not "democracy" that we're trying to plant over there, what is it? An ally in the Middle East? The seeds of discontent to bring down regional authoritarian governments that hate us? Fine. Let's say so.

END

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