<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Wednesday, March 17, 2004

A bleak future for democracy?

Yesterday, for some reason, I came accross this classic essay by Robert Kaplan, 'Was Democracy just a moment?' I am currently looking for opposing views to counterbalance his pessimistic view on democracy. It is a lengthy piece of work that might still hold true today.

He argues:
Because democracy neither forms states nor strengthens them initially, multi-party systems are best suited to nations that already have efficient bureaucracies and a middle class that pays income tax, and where primary issues such as borders and power-sharing have already been resolved, leaving politicians free to bicker about the budget and other secondary matters.

Later on, he adds:
The level of social development required by democracy as it is known in the West has existed in only a minority of places -- and even there only during certain periods of history. We are entering a troubling transition, and the irony is that while we preach our version of democracy abroad, it slips away from us at home.

Kaplan explains:
Democratic governance, at the federal, state, and local levels, goes on. But its ability to affect our lives is limited. The growing piles of our material possessions make personal life more complex and leave less time for communal matters. And as communities become liberated from geography, as well as more specialized culturally and electronically, they will increasingly fall outside the realm of traditional governance. Democracy loses meaning if both rulers and ruled cease to be part of a community tied to a specific territory. In this historical transition phase, lasting perhaps a century or more, in which globalization has begun but is not complete and loyalties are highly confused, civil society will be harder to maintain. How and when we vote during the next hundred years may be a minor detail for historians.

The people themselves are putting democracy aside:
The Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz provides the definitive view on why Americans degrade themselves with mass culture: "Today man believes that there is nothing in him, so he accepts anything, even if he knows it to be bad, in order to find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone." Of course, it is because people find so little in themselves that they fill their world with celebrities. The masses avoid important national and international news because much of it is tragic, even as they show an unlimited appetite for the details of Princess Diana's death. This willingness to give up self and responsibility is the sine qua non for tyranny.

He concludes his essay with:
And that brings us to a sober realization. If democracy, the crowning political achievement of the West, is gradually being transfigured, in part because of technology, then the West will suffer the same fate as earlier civilizations. Just as Rome believed it was giving final expression to the republican ideal of the Greeks, and just as medieval Kings believed they were giving final expression to the Roman ideal, we believe, as the early Christians did, that we are bringing freedom and a better life to the rest of humankind.


Note: Robert Kagan blasted Robert D. Kaplan in the New Republic 2001, writing that "Kaplan's style of analysis is the reverse of historical scholarship. It consists of leaping from a limited number of observations to wild speculations of the broadest conceivable nature."

Comments-[ comments.]

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?