Making the World ‘Safe’ for Democracy, Liberty Letters Quote of the Day
… the administration’s official rhetoric continues to be marred by a tendency to treat modern democracy as a self-evident desideratum, even as the regime “according to nature.” As friendly critics such as Fareed Zakharia have pointed out, both the administration and its neoconservative allies woefully underestimate the despotic propensities inherent in electoral democracy, and this despite the rising electoral fortunes of Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in the Middle East and of a Leftist authoritarian like Hugo Chavez in Latin America. They continue to speak ritualistically about “democracy” when what they really have in mind is that complex synthesis of the rule of law, constitutionalism, federalism, and representative government that Zakharia calls “constitutional liberalism.” Their “democratic” monomania marks a break with an older conservative tradition which always insisted that Western liberty draws on intellectual and spiritual resources broader and deeper thatn that of modern democracy. The idioms of constitutionalism and representative government have little room in a doctrine that places such inordinate emphasis on the love of liberty in the human soul and its natural expression through majority votes.
Critics who raise perfectly legitimate and necessary questions about the cultural prerequisites of democratic self-government are sumarily dismissed by President Bush or Prime Minister Blair as cultural relativists, or even as racists – as if “democracy” arises automatically once impediments are removed. As ominously, the partisans of “global democracy” turn a blind eye to the historical evidence that suggests it is not from authoritarian regimes, but from weak and fledgling “democracies,” that totalitarianism arises: consider Russia in 1917, Italy in 1922, and Germany in 1933. The best conservative thinkers of the last two centuries have been wary of unalloyed democracy precisely because they cared deeply about the preservation of human liberty and recognized the powerful affinities between mass democracy and modern totalitarianism. There are totalitarian propensities inherent in what the French political philosopher Betrand de Jouvenel once called “sovereignty in itself”: the illusion that the “sovereign” human will is the ultimate arbiter of the moral and political world.”
From: “Conservatism, Democracy, and Foreign Policy,” by Daniel J. Mahoney, featured in the Fall 2006 issue of “The Intercollegiate Review.”
Liberty Letters editor Steve Farrell is a pundit with America's Newspage, Newsmax.com, associate professor of political economy at George Wythe College, and the author of the highly praised inspirational novel, "Dark Rose." | More from Steve Farrell
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