Putting Liberty First: The Case Against Democracy

The solution, he argues, is to force them to devote their unearned revenues to popular education and economic development. That won't be easy in Saudi Arabia, but Zakaria cites the case of Chad as an example of what should be done. In exchange for helping Chad develop its oil fields, the World Bank stipulated that 80 percent of the revenues be spent on health, education, and rural infrastructure, 5 percent be spent on people living near the oil fields, and 10 percent be left in escrow for future generations -- leaving the government only 5 percent to spend on itself.

Zakaria does not comment specifically on the prospects of democracy in a post-Saddam Iraq, but the implications of his analysis are clear. If the United States invades and tries to move Iraq toward democracy, it will face two major obstacles: group rivalries and oil. What Zakaria writes of the Balkans could easily apply to a future Iraq: "The introduction of democracy in divided societies has actually fomented nationalism, ethnic conflict, and even war." And Iraq's oil reserves, the second largest in the world, could encourage another oil autocracy like Saudi Arabia if the revenues are not distributed on the model of Chad. To create a liberal democracy in Iraq, the United States and the international community will have to figure out a way to keep communal tensions in check while devoting the bulk of the country's oil revenues to the development of a middle class that is not tied to the state or to oil -- not an easy task.

THE REVOLTING MASSES

In the second part of The Future of Freedom, Zakaria argues that the United States suffers from an excess of democracy, which is threatening liberty. The analysis appears to come full circle -- liberty leads to democracy and democracy ends up undermining liberty, prompting him to call for "a restoration of balance" between them. But when Zakaria writes about liberty and democracy in this section, he uses different definitions, and his analysis is less persuasive.

Liberty now refers to the conditions that accompanied the creation of constitutional liberty in the United States: delegated power, representative rather than plebiscitary government, checks and balances on majority rule. Zakaria identifies these Madisonian constraints on direct democracy with liberty. Yet these do not exist in the same fashion in Singapore or Hong Kong, and are not equivalent to, nor essential ingredients of, what Zakaria describes as constitutional liberty elsewhere in the book.

Democracy, meanwhile, is now talked about in terms of "democratization," which includes not only the extension of suffrage, but also the breakdown of hierarchies and traditional authority, the opening up of closed systems through deregulation, and "pressures from the masses." Democratization means the displacement of high culture by blockbuster movies, romance novels, and commercial art. (When he writes about culture, Zakaria sounds like the early-twentieth-century Spanish philosopher and "mass society" theorist Jose Ortega y Gasset.) In politics, it means the replacement of the party system with presidential primaries and referenda, and of the independent think tank by the policy group that is in fact a lobbying organization. In business, it is associated with "marketization" and means pension funds, credit cards, advertising by lawyers, and products geared to mass markets.

Zakaria argues that democratization in the political arena has created "an ever growing class of professional consultants, lobbyists, pollsters, and activists. ... By declaring war on elitism, we have produced politics by a hidden elite -- unaccountable, unresponsive, and often unconcerned with any larger public interest." He attributes congressional gridlock to the elimination of congressional hierarchies by the reforms of the early 1970s. He laments the decline of the independent professional in business, which became evident during the recent financial scandals.

Zakaria believes these ills could be remedied by "reintegrating constitutional liberalism into the practice of democracy." He proposes organizations by which professionals can police themselves and advocates the spread of delegated institutions such as the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Military Base Closing Commission, which are accountable to the public but distanced from partisan and lobbying pressures.

Most of the problems Zakaria cites are genuine, and some of the solutions he suggests make sense. Nonpartisan commissions, which originated in the Progressive Era, have been useful in finding solutions to politically charged issues such as military base closing, and in the early 1980s, Social Security. But they, too, have sometimes been politicized. George W. Bush's Social Security commission, for instance, was stacked with proponents of the administration's plan for privatization. And self-policing certainly didn't work well with the accounting profession.

One problem with this part of Zakaria's analysis is the relationship he draws between democratization and Madisonian liberty, on the one hand, and democracy and constitutional liberty on the other. Democratization certainly has a core meaning that corresponds to democracy. Expanding the vote for blacks in the South involved democratization and was a victory for democracy. So was establishing the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, which put some private economic decisions under public oversight.