Resistencia a la Rotura
VI. CONCLUSIONES
To clarify the connection between political ideologies and the democratic ideal, let us examine briefly the three principal versions of democracy in the modern world.
Although all three share several features, their differences are sharp enough to make them distinctive and competing conceptions of democracy.
Liberal Democracy. As the name suggests, liberal democracy emerged from liberalism—the ideology examined in our next chapter. As with liberalism in general, liberal democracy stresses the rights and liberty of the individual, and it is this form of democracy that characterizes most Western democracies. For liberals, democracy is certainly rule by the people, but an essential part of this rule includes the protec-tion of individual rights and liberties. This means that majority rule must be limited.
Democracy is rule by the majority of the people, in this view, but only as long as those in the majority do not try to deprive individuals or minorities of their basic civil rights. The right to speak and worship freely, the right to run for public office, the right to own property—these are among the rights and liberties that liberals have generally taken to be necessary to realize the democratic ideal as they interpret it.
Social Democracy. Within the Western democracies, especially in Europe, the main challenge to the liberal conception is social democracy. This view is linked to the ide-ology of socialism. From a “social democratic” or “democratic socialist” perspective, the key to democracy is equality, especially equal power in society and government.
Social democrats argue that liberal democracy puts poor and working-class people at the mercy of the rich. In the modern world, they say, money is a major source of power, and those who have wealth have power over those who do not. Wealth makes it possible to run for office and to influence government policies, so the rich exercise much greater influence when public policies are made. Yet this advantage, social democrats insist, is hardly democratic. Democracy is rule by the people, and such rule requires that every person have a roughly equal influence over the government, in keeping with the principle “one person, one vote.” But we will not really have this equal influence, social democrats say, unless we take steps to distribute power—
including economic power—in a more nearly equal fashion. That is why the program of social democrats typically calls for the redistribution of wealth to promote equal-ity, public rather than private control of natural resources and major industries, and workers’ control of the workplace. Like liberals, then, social democrats want to pre-serve civil liberties and promote fair competition for political office. Unlike liberals, however, they deny that most people can be truly free or political competition fair when great inequalities of wealth and power prevail.
People’s Democracy. In communist countries, the prevailing version of the demo-cratic ideal has been people’s democracy. In some ways people’s democracy is theo-retically closer to the original Greek idea of democracy—rule by and in the interests of the demos, the common people—than liberal or social democracy. From a com-munist perspective, the common people are the proletariat, or the working class, and democracy will not be achieved until government rules in their interest. This does not necessarily mean that the proletariat must itself directly control the government.
As we shall see in Chapter 5, communists once called for the dictatorship of the proletariat, a form of dictatorship that Karl Marx described as ruling in the interests of the working class. The immediate purpose of this dictatorship would be to sup-press the capitalists or bourgeoisie who have previously used their power and wealth to exploit the working class. By suppressing them, the dictatorship of the proletariat supposedly prepares the common people for the classless society of the communist future, when the state itself will “wither away.” In the meantime, people’s democ-racy is to consist of rule by the Communist Party for the benefit of the working majority. This is the sense in which Mao Zedong spoke of a “people’s democratic dictatorship” in the People’s Republic of China.
When the Soviet Union and its communist regime disintegrated in the early 1990s, the idea of people’s democracy suffered a serious blow. But in China, the world’s most populous country, this vision of the democratic ideal persists, if per-haps only in the pronouncements of the communist leadership. In the summer
of 1989, after ordering an attack on students protesting in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—ironically, for the sake of greater democracy—the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party dogmatically continued to insist on the need for a “people’s democratic dictatorship.” The alternative, they said, was “bourgeois liberaliza-tion”—otherwise known as liberal democracy—and this they found completely unacceptable, even if this meant maintaining their iron-fisted hold on power and information until some vague and unspecified future point. In the early twenty-first century, however, they share this view only with the communist leaders of Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea. It also bears mentioning that none of these regimes, nor any others committed to “people’s democracy,” has ever seen fit to move beyond rule by a single authoritarian and allegedly all-wise Communist party. As critics contend, this raises serious and troubling questions about the authenticity and depth of their dedication to this or any other version of the democratic ideal.
CONCLUSION
We have spoken so far of democracy as an ideal that different ideologies envision in their own ways. But we must also recognize that ideologies try to put these ideals into effect—to implement them in the form of constitutions and institutions—and that is no easy matter, as we see quite clearly in recent and ongoing attempts to in-troduce liberal democracy into formerly undemocratic countries, such as Iraq, or the
“people’s democracies” of the former Soviet Union. Following in the footsteps of Aristotle, modern political scientists and democratic theorists argue that democracy cannot be transplanted easily, if at all, in culturally alien or barren soil. Liberal and social democracy require a culture of tolerance; of live-and-let-live; of fair play, trust, mutual respect, and a willingness to compromise; of disagreements aired openly; of defeats borne gracefully by the losers and generously by the winners. Where these preconditions are absent, neither liberal nor social democracy can flourish or perhaps even survive for very long.24
Some contemporary commentators have wondered whether democracy in America might be undermined by ideologically polarized and polarizing “talk ra-dio” and by hyperpartisan television commentators who hurl insults and innuendos at members of the other political party, sowing the seeds of distrust and disrespect among the citizenry.25 Other commentators and critics claim that Americans are increasingly sorting themselves into their own “lifestyle enclaves” of like-minded neighbors, friends, and associates. In his book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (2008), Bill Bishop writes:
We have built a country where everyone can choose the neighborhood (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are liv-ing with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t under-stand, and can barely conceive of “those people” who live just a few miles away.26 Still other observers, by contrast, claim that empirical evidence from opinion surveys strongly suggests that the specter of a self-sorted and badly “polarized America” is a
“myth” created and maintained by political partisans and abetted by television and talk radio to boost ratings (and advertising revenue), and that Americans of almost all political persuasions agree on far more than they disagree about. The same can-not be said, however, for political leaders in Congress and many state legislatures, who often tend to be much more deeply divided along partisan and ideological lines than their constituents are.27
To conclude: liberal democracy, social democracy, and people’s democracy are the main visions of the democratic ideal in the modern world. In this democratic age, it is important to understand these visions and how they relate to various politi-cal ideologies. With this point in mind, we shall explore in the next seven chapters the major ideologies of the modern world—liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and fascism—and some of their recently emerging rivals. Each discussion will conclude with an assessment of the connection between the particular ideology and its inter-pretation of the democratic ideal.
NOTES
1. Pericles’s Funeral Oration, from Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, vol. I, 2nd ed., trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), pp. 126–135. Also in Terence Ball, Richard Dagger, and Daniel O’Neill, eds., Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader, 9th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2014), selection 2.3.
2. Ibid., p. 129.
3. Plato, Apology, 31, in The Trial and Death of Socrates, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983), p. 33.
4. For Plato’s account of democracy, see Book VIII of his Republic.
5. The Politics of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Modern Library, 1943), p. 192; also in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, eds.,Ideals and Ideologies, selection 2.4.
6. Ibid., p. 146; Ideals and Ideologies, selection 2.4.
7. The New Testament, Rom 13:1–2.
8. See Quentin Skinner, “The Italian City-Republics,” in John Dunn, ed., Democracy: The Unfinished Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 57–69.
9. William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth, Third Part, Act III, Scene 2.
10. See, for example, Mary Dietz, “Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of De-ception,” American Political Science Review 80 (September 1986): 777–799, along with the response by John Langton and rejoinder by Dietz in American Political Science Re-view 81 (December 1987): 1277–1288.
11. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).
12. Quotations from the Rhode Island constitutions are from Russell Hanson, “Democ-racy,” in Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 72–73.
13. Rainsborough’s remarks are from David Wootton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1986), p. 286.
14. For an elaboration of this analysis, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
15. John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776), in Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, vol. IV (Boston: Little and Brown, 1851), p. 194; also in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, eds., Ideals and Ideologies, selection 2.6.
16. For criticism of the Senate and other “undemocratic” features of the Constitution, see Robert Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
17. The Federalist, ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), No. 51, p. 252.
18. For two analyses of contemporary American life that owe much to Tocqueville, see Rob-ert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1986); and Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
19. Both quotations are from Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, in Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1951), pp. 289, 291; also in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, eds., Ideals and Ideologies, selec-tion 2.9. For further discussion of “economic” versus “educative” theories of democracy, see Terence Ball, Transforming Political Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), chap. 6.
20. For a discussion of democracy and liberty in Switzerland, see Benjamin Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).
21. Advocates of term limits in the United States primarily have Congress in mind; the presi-dent is already limited to two terms in office. For the case for term limits, see George Will, Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1992); for the opposing view, see Garry Wills, “Undemocratic Vistas,” New York Review of Books 39 (November 19, 1992): 28–34.
22. For a brief history of voter suppression in the United States, see Alexander Keyssar, “The Strange Career of Voter Suppression,”New York Times, February 13, 2012, p. A 19;
reprinted in Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill, eds., Ideals and Ideologies, selection 2.10.
23. For a discussion of the development of “democratic republicanism” in the United States, see Russell L. Hanson, “ ‘Commons’ and ‘Commonwealth’ at the American Founding:
Democratic Republicanism as the New American Hybrid,” in Terence Ball and J. G. A.
Pocock, eds., Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 165–193.
24. For a collection of essays on the importance of the cultural preconditions of democracy, see Charles Cnudde and Deane Neubauer, eds., Empirical Democratic Theory (Chicago:
Markham, 1969).
25. See Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Dworkin answers the question posed in his title in the affirmative.
26. Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 40.
27. See Morris P. Fiorina, with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 2011). See also the careful critique of Bishop’s method, argument, evidence, and conclusions in Samuel J. Abrams and Morris P. Fiorina, “ ‘The Big Sort’ that Wasn’t: A Skeptical Reexamination,” PS:
Political Science & Politics, 45:2 (April 2012), pp. 203–210.
FOR FURTHER READING
Dagger, Richard. Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
———. “Republican Citizenship,” in E. F. Isin and B. S. Turner, eds., Handbook of Citizen-ship Studies. London: Sage Publications, 2002.
Dahl, Robert. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
———. On Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
———. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Dunn, John, ed. Democracy: The Unfinished Journey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Farrar, Cynthia. The Origins of Democratic Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Gooch, G. P. English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1959.
Gould, Carol C. Rethinking Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Hanson, Russell L. The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations with Our Past.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Held, David. Models of Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Honohan, Iseult. Civic Republicanism. London: Routledge, 2002.
Macpherson, C. B. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
———. The Real World of Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Mansbridge, Jane. Beyond Adversary Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Pateman, Carole. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Rahe, Paul. Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revo-lution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Sandel, Michael. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. New York:
Basic Books, 1996.
Skinner, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Walzer, Michael. Radical Principles. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.
From the Ball, Dagger, and O’Neill Reader Ideals and Ideologies, Ninth Edition
Part II: The Democratic Ideal
Historical and Philosophical Foundations 2.2 Euripides—Democracy and Despotism 2.3 Pericles—Funeral Oration
2.4 Aristotle—Democratic Judgment and the “Middling” Constitution 2.5 Niccolò Machiavelli—What’s Wrong with Princely Rule?
2.6 John Adams—What Is a Republic?
2.7 Bill of Rights of the United States
2.8 Alexis de Tocqueville—Democracy and Equality
2.9 John Stuart Mill—Democratic Participation and Political Education 2.10 Alexander Keyssar – The Strange Career of Voter Suppression
44
LIBERALISM
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
F
or more than three centuries, the hallmark of liberalism has been the attempt to promote individual liberty. But this very broad goal leaves room for liberals to disagree among themselves as to what exactly liberty is and how best to promote it.Indeed, this disagreement is now so sharp that liberalism is split into two rival camps of “neoclassical” and “welfare” liberals. Later in this chapter we shall see how this split occurred. But first we need to look at that broad area of common ground on which all liberals meet—the desire to promote individual liberty.
The words “liberal” and “liberty” both derive from the Latin liber, meaning
“free.” “Liberal” did not enter the vocabulary of politics until early in the nineteenth century, however, long after “liberty” was widely used as a political term—and at least a century after ideas now regarded as liberal were in the air. Before the nine-teenth century, “liberal” was commonly used to mean “generous” or “tolerant”—an attitude that supposedly befit a “gentleman,” just as a “liberal education” was meant to prepare a young gentleman for life. “Liberal” still means generous or tolerant, of course, as when someone says that a teacher follows a liberal grading policy or a child has liberal parents. But nowadays, through an extension of this common use,
“liberal” more often refers to a political position or point of view.
The first clear sign of this political use occurred in the early nineteenth century when a faction of the Spanish legislature adopted the name Liberales. From there the term traveled to France and Great Britain, where the party known as the Whigs evolved by the 1840s into the Liberal Party. These early liberals shared a desire for a more open and tolerant society—one in which people would be free to pursue their own ideas and interests with as little interference as possible. A liberal society was to be, in short, a “free” society. But what makes a society “free”? What is freedom and how can we best promote it? These questions have occupied liberals for more than three centuries now, providing the grounds not only for arguments among liberals but also for disputes between liberalism and other ideologies.