Is Bush about to give up the central goal of his Mideast policy?

A key though unstated assumption of President Bush’s Muslim Democracy Project is that the Muslims will give up Islam, since Islam and liberal democracy are mutually exclusive. If this utopian requirement—that the Muslims must renounce Islam for democratization to happen—had been stated plainly from the start, the impossibility of the Democracy Project would have been clear to everyone, and we would have been spared a lot of lies and nonsense over the last three years, and thousands of American soldiers would have been spared their lives and limbs.

Since it was impossible that the Muslims would give up Islam, it seems that President Bush, at long last, is going to have to give up democratization. The below is from a New York Sun article on the president’s Iran study groups which are preparing to tell him to drop the goal of democracy in Iraq:

“If we are able to promote representative, representative government, not necessarily democracy, in a number of nations in the Middle East and bring more freedom to the people of that part of the world, it will have been a success,” [James Baker] said.

That distinction is crucial, according to one member of the expert working groups. “Baker wants to believe that Sunni dictators in Sunni majority states are representative,” the group member, who requested anonymity, said.

Representative government is certainly to be preferred over democracy—for America as well as for Iraq. But by defining dictatorships as representative government Baker is obviously departing from normal understandings of that term.

Up until the 1960s, Americans spoke of their system of government as “representative government” more often than as “democracy,” and “democracy” was used less as a noun than as an adjective, “democratic,” which conveyed the idea that democracy was an important aspect of our system of government, not its totality. Representative government is both a more accurate description of our system than “democracy,” and a better thing in itself. Representative government suggests the multilayered nature of our constitutional system, grounded on the consent of the governed from which all legitimacy and sovereignty flow, but operating through a deliberative process of checks and balances. That’s the genius of our government, as created by the Founders. That’s the way Americans always used to talk about our Constitution, and they were deeply proud of it. Democracy, by contrast, is a one-dimensional concept, reducing everything to the will of the people, with the people conceived of as an undifferentiated mass of persons having mathematically equal rights. Democracy in and of itself contains no idea of representative deliberation, of balance of powers, of constitutional limits on government powers, of federalism, of state and regional differences, and it certainly ignores the non-democratic features of our system without which it could not have come into existence, such as the equal representation in the Senate of states with widely unequal populations, and the election of the president, not by a single election of all voters in the country, but by 50 separate state elections. Since the term democracy, which means rule by the people, does not describe any of the features of our system I’ve just listed, we are constantly forced to expand artificially the meaning of democracy in order to account for them. Meanwhile, a true democracy, i.e., a consistent, pure democracy, would tend to be tyrannical, since, having no way to distribute power or to represent the actual, variegated make-up of the society, there would be no basis on which to resist the massed will of the majority. The true basis of liberty is not democracy, but republicanism, defined as the Constitutional distribution and separation of powers, as I have explained here.

When I was in school, Americans commonly echoed and approved the Founders’ view that democracy meant mob rule. But since the 1960s and ‘70s, “democracy”—unqualified, unmodulated democracy—has become American’s sole political ideal and the sole term by which they describe their government. Thus today’s mainstream conservatives, who believe in America while the left is at best skeptical of it, unquestioningly and passionately embrace a radical liberal concept of government that all previous generations of Americans would have rejected. Describing our mixed, constitutional, federal, liberal, democratic-republican system as simply “democracy” makes it impossible for us to understand, explain, or defend our system. We find ourselves constantly looking like hypocrites, because we have no “democratic” way to explain essential, non-democratic components of our system such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate.

So, democracy neither describes our system accurately, nor would it be desirable in itself. How deluded have we been, then, to declare that we were seeking “democracy” for the Muslim country of Iraq, when we ourselves have never had true democracy, nor would we want it if we could have it!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 16, 2006 01:30 AM | Send