Divorced From Democracy: A Critical Examination Of Democracy & It’s Possible Alternatives

By

Todd Julie

For

Professors Joseph Wong & Jeffrey Kopstein

POL101

T.A. Alena Drieschova

Nov.14, 2011

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Paper question:

Winston Churchill once remarked: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Construct an argument by materials from the readings and lectures in your essay.

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Winston Churchill's statement is more difficult to assess than it first appears. To do so,

we must keep three important considerations in mind: Firstly, we must be careful to

differentiate between democracy and capitalism. These two are often confused and the

former given an automatic share in the accomplishments of the latter. Secondly, we must

decide on the separate strengths and weaknesses of each and their relative importance to

modern society. Thirdly, should we determine capitalism to be the more important

system, we must ask ourselves whether or not there is another political system, more

suited to extract the maximum value from capitalism.

In this paper I will assert that capitalism is, by far, the dominant partner in a long,

historical marriage of convenience with democracy. Thus joined, capitalism's

accomplishments could happily be deposited in a joint bank account without too much

squabbling over fair portions of credit. I will also assert that it is the material comforts

that have come with capitalism that societies truly value. However, unrestrained

capitalism is not without its darker side and the wealth we so value, is endangered by

democracy’s failure to provide a strong counterpoint to capitalism’s more inequitable

excesses. Through out the twentieth century, democracy could still be viewed as the

lesser evil, in comparison to Nazism or Soviet communism. With the appearance of

twenty-first century China – an autocracy practicing a more secure form of state–

controlled capitalism and meeting with more success than any of the western

democracies, it may be time for a divorce of capitalism from its former partner.

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Benjamin Constant grasped this potential flaw in modern democracy; that men would

give up their political freedom – the guarantee of their prized civil freedoms – to

recklessly pursue their own happiness (Constant, p.12). To a great extent, this is what has

happened. More recent studies by Alexander Todorov have shown gut reactions to a

political candidate's face to be accurate in predicting the outcome of elections almost 70

per cent of the time (Todorov, p.1623). Combined with findings by Leonard

Wantchekon, that more generalized political slogans work better for challengers in an

election, while more specific promises work better for incumbents (Wantchekon, p.417),

we get a picture of democracy as a system of widespread irrationality. Yet the system

continues to function better than all of its historical alternatives. One way to reconcile

these facts is to conclude that democracy is not the real guiding principal of our modern

society. Drawing attention to the differences between ancient and modern liberty,

Constant pointed out that moderns attach a great deal more importance to individual

freedoms and civil society than to political rights.

Today, democracy faces a "collective action problem" (Olson) of truly global

proportions. Olson defines the collective action problem this way: "Though all of the

members of a group therefore have a common interest in obtaining the collective benefit,

they have no common interest in paying the cost of that collective benefit" (Olson, p.21).

He also goes on to draw a distinction between large and small groups, in reference to this

problem. Members of smaller groups will stand a greater chance of obtaining a greater

share of the collective good. As he says, "The larger the group, the farther it will fall

short of providing an optimal amount of a collective good" (Olson, p.35). Referring these

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ideas back to Constant, we might say the small ancient city-states of Greece faced a much

smaller collective action problem and so, could afford more direct political freedoms.

The much larger nation-state faced a larger collective action problem and curtailed

political rights accordingly. Interestingly enough, while increasing size may be bad for

democracy, it's great for capitalism because it provides a larger common market.

Modern democracy exists as the plaything of free market capitalism. The power of

interference in the affairs of individuals (characteristic of ancient democracies) (Constant,

p.11) is stripped from modern democracy, not to provide men with individual liberty but

to turn around and give this right of interference to commerce. Marx’s criticism that

bourgeois notions of “freedom, culture, law, . . . are but the outgrowth of the conditions

of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property” (Marx, p.24), is no less true today

than when he wrote it. It is interesting to think about Constant's comparison of ancient

and modern liberty, in the light of Marx's critique of capitalism. Constant says, "The

abolition of slavery has deprived the free population of all the leisure they used to have

when slaves did most of the work" (Constant, p.4). He puts fourth that moderns don't

own slaves and so, don't have as much time to devote to the exercise of political decision

making (Constant, p.5). Marx points out, the capitalist class have an entire underclass of

working poor who they exploit as no other group of men in history have been exploited

(Marx, P.20). One does not have to agree with the feasibility of Marx’s communist

revolution to see the rightness of his critique of unfettered capitalism.

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In the twentieth century it was easy to attribute western successes to a combination of

democracy and capitalism and not think too deeply about which element was really the

deciding factor. Confronted by two possible alternatives: fascism and Soviet

communism, the west emerged triumphant. Fascism was defeated militarily during

WWII and in the case of Nazism, can be dismissed on purely moral grounds. Soviet

communism survived the war. While moral claims can be made against Stalin, his

prediction that the Soviet Union had to do for it's economy in 10 years what other

countries do in 50 or be buried by them (Kopstein, Lecture Oct.17) and the imperatives

such a statement presented makes this a slightly less clear-cut case. Especially given the

almost successful Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union a few years after Stalin made this

prediction (Kopstein, Lecture Oct.17). However, in subsequent decades running up to

1989, the Soviet Union's economy stagnated and was far outstripped by the America's

capitalist democracy (Kopstein, Lecture Oct.17). Democratic capitalism was a more

efficient system than Soviet communism.

In the twenty-first century, we have an example in China of a large non-democratic,

capitalist economy that appears to be outshining the U.S. This tends to support the view

that it is capitalism that is the true organizational principle of society and democracy is

incidental. Should China continue to out-produce the U.S and pull more and more of its

own citizens out of poverty, as the U.S itself did vis-a-vis the Soviets, are we not forced

to conclude that democracy has been ousted as the superior form of government?

Robbed of the economic high ground, it is tempting to respond by trying to seize the

moral high ground. There may be something here. China does have a large amount of

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political prisoners (Friedman, p.260). Chinese officials respond to this by pointing out

that the U.S. does not have a very good human rights record (Wong, Lecture, Oct.31).

Eric Friedman cites Mauzy and Barter, whose studies in Malaysia indicate that "middle

class consumers privilege stability" (Freidman, p.258). There is no reason to expect the

feelings of the Chinese middle class to be any different. As far as the lower classes are

concerned, Freidman himself points out that "democracy is not a top demand of the worst

off in the system" (Freidman, p.261). In fact, they demand "a strong, centralized state

that will stop privileging the corruptly rich and instead redistribute wealth" (Friedman,

p.261). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has in fact, made it official policy to

narrow income inequality in China (Wong, Lecture, Oct.31). The claims of the CCP, that

democratization would de-stabilize China (Freidman, p.259), are also not implausible

given the size of China's population and the still very large numbers of poor people.

According to Professor Wong, Chinese officials also consider democracy unnecessary,

given that everyone agrees on the desired end of successful government, namely

increasing economic prosperity, widely distributed (Wong, Lecture, Oct.31).

The continuing validity of Winston Churchill's statement is therefore, not entirely clear.

Democracy on a national or international scale renders the supposedly free individual

easy prey for a capitalist system that in a sense dictates his actions anyway. The

collective action problem, defined by Olson, illustrates how in economies of this scale the

rational individual will live off the system without really contributing to it (Olson, p.21).

While being free to obey the dictates of the market may be better than living under an

irrational and genocidal dictatorship or an autocratic state that fails to provide its citizens

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with a modern standard of living, it cannot immediately be said to trump the example

provided by modern China. China's "benevolent dictatorship" (Wong, Lecture, Oct.31)

appears to be able to martial capitalism towards the needs of the state and its citizens,

rather than leaving both to the whims of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’.

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