As with evaluating America as a world power, so also with assessing the value of the liberal democracy.
Isn't it ironic that my attempts to rally Americans to oppose this Bushite regime should evoke declarations from the left about how corrupt our supposedly democratic system has always been, which serves only to provide cover to Bush?
Our capitalist system, they remind us, produces great inequalities of wealth that corrupt our supposed democracy into a plutocracy. Our political system manipulates and exploits the common people, they say, rather than serves them. And the corporate media, and other institutions engaged in the "marketplace of ideas," become extensions of these plutocratic empires of corrupt power. And all this was true long before the rise of the Bushites.
But when it comes to our basic attitude toward liberal democracy, when it comes to whether we condemn it or we embrace and celebrate it, it is not that ideal standard but the standard of actual human history that we should use.
There is here one key truth to contemplate: Of all the socio-political systems that have been created in the thousands of years since civilized societies, liberal democracy is --for all its vulnerabilites to corruption-- the best system yet found for creating a just and decent society. (One is reminded of Churchill's observation that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.") Its true competitors are not some imagined perfection, but the still more corrupt systems of feudal lords, of the divine rights of kings, of dictatorships, and of communist and fascist totalitarianism.
That points to a human tragedy, I know, but it also points to a profound and inescapable truth we cannot allow ourselves to ignore: the history of civilization is mostly the history of tyranny and oppression, of injustice and enslavement. Corruption is the natural tendency of systems of civilized governance, just as water tends to flow downhill, and systems generally tend toward entropy.
Only the careful construction of systems of checks and balance to contain the free play of power gives a society a chance at blocking the downhill slide into injustice. The American Constitution is one such carefully constructed system.
But the system also needs to be constantly maintained to prevent the waters of corruption from seeping out through cracks that develop. It is in the nature of the predicament of civilized humans that ANY system we devise will tend to devolve into unjust inequalities of power, a kind of entropic tendency. That is what is behind Thomas Jefferson's call upon us citizens to exercise "eternal vigilance. "
One of my leftist challengers has conceded that neither past nor contemporary history provides an example of a society more just and more decent than those created by modern liberal democracies. Yet this same challenger continually scorns the whole liberal project.
To me, the combination of that concession and that scorn makes no sense. If liberal democracy is the best of our available options, we owe its achievement on this continent our gratitude, not our scorn. It's as if, threatened with drowning in a stormy sea, one were to swim away from a lifeboat, cursing it for not being a pleasure boat.
This challenger presents himself as a champion of "people power." But nowhere else in the history of civilization have citizens had so much power over their system as in liberal democracies.
Certainly, our liberal democracy has always been deeply marbled with injustice. And it seems reasonably clear that the the couple of decades prior to the Bushime's coming to power was a period of downhill slide in the American system. The level of plutocratic inequality increased; the quality of our public discourse declined.
But that does not indict the system of liberal democracy itself, but only brings into sharp relief how profound is the challenge of preventing the corruption of its ideals.
If we look at other liberal democracies in the world, we find that in most of them the balance between the economic and political systems has been better maintained. In other words, it would seem that in America too much of the destiny of our nation is decided by people acting as social atoms in the marketplace and too list by the people deciding collectively through the political system.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
