Reading Dawisha and Parrott's Conflict, Cleavage, and Change in Central Asia and the Caucuses, the fourth volume in their well-reputed series Democratization and Authoritarianism in Postcommunist Societies, I had to prop myself up on my pillows and re-read the following excerpt:
Needless to say, it always irks me quite a bit when we hold transition countries to standards of democracy that we, as Americans, fail to meet.Granted, Professor Dawisha does not focus on two-party monopolies in elections for executive power, but that it not because it is insignificant. In fact, what better way to ensure political complacency and conservatism than by limiting the contest for the most powerful office in the land (as greatly expanded under the recent Bush administration) to two parties rewarded for the ability to stay the same?
But most Americans probably don't even realize we fail to meet these standards-- that our democracy is not as "consolidated" as we might believe. Fox News sure never reports on it. Instead, the news channels report that "Americans have moved to the center". We hear complaints from voters that both political parties appear indistinguishable-- that the candidates support the same policies-- and that voting might not be worthwhile under such conditions. We learn that we are fortunate in being spared the "fighting" and "inefficiency" of democracries in which coalition-building is required (i.e. Great Britian, Israel, Romania, etc.) because our government gets things done faster. Our democracy is strong, lasting, and, well, the most majoritarian.
Being the most majoritarian democracy, however, is far from being a beacon on the hill radiating liberty for all to see. To understand why this might be the case, let's take a look at a contemporary headline from the Georgian Daily-- "Majoritarian Democracy Threatens Eurasia's Ethnic Minorities and the Countries They Live In". The article is dated from September 2008. From the article, it seems the example of American majoritarianism is not a successful model for transition states with ethnic minorities-- in essence, all transition states.
A majoritarian democracy is effective in preserving a political system supported by a majority of citizens. That is it's major benefit. However, a majoritarian democracy tends to represent the political will of the majority without concern for the individual rights of the minorities (including non-citizen minorities). This is not problematic unless the will of the majority is somehow susceptible to corruption through influence, brainwashing, or bribery in a way that either violates the human rights (or individual rights) of the minority. Unfortunately, such a scenario is not as rare as one might hope. "Yes, but all Americans have civil rights", we insist. Indeed, all American citizens do have rights-- until one day, they don't.
The big problem for majoritarian democracy is that it fails to prevent the will of the majority from becoming the law of the land. The will of the majority has been, through various times in history, prone to capture by racism, ethnic nationalism, and eugenics, as articulated by the political elite. There is nothing as powerful as the political use of "national crisis" to make individual rights seem silly.
The majority of German citizens supported Hitler and the Nazi Party. The majority of Americans supported the internment of those "dangerous" Japanese Americans during a time of war. The majority of Americans support "the war on drugs" and "the war on terrorism", which provide contemporary examples of how indiviudual rights can be legally abridged in a majoritarian system. All it takes is a change in what is considered "legal". If it becomes to legal to search a person on mere suspicion of being an enemy in the war on drugs, then social custom adapts accordingly. Thus, we are accustomed to viewing drug users as criminals, or enemies of the state. It might seem like a huge jump from calling someone a criminal to deeming them an "enemy of the state", but, in legal fact, it is no jump at all.
I am grateful to Richard Overy for observing, in The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, that Hitler and Stalin could not have maintained their power unless they created an amorphous, ever-changing "internal enemy" to justify the suspension of individual rights. In Hitler's case, the internal enemy was cast as the biological threat to the pure German volk, thus Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and other biologically un-Aryan people were suspect. It is easier to see ethnicity as a threat than we prefer to think, per the example of the Japanese during World War II. In Stalin's case, the internal enemy included those members of the undefined and constantly-morphing designation, "threats to socialism". Over time, this designation expanded to involve Jews, former farmers and entrepreneurs, former intellectuals, Poles, Tatars, and various other regional ethnicities. The threat from "contamination" by contact with this internal enemy, often designated as "terrorist" by the Soviet courts, was so severe that a conversation or dinner meeting or book exchange with a member of these groups could land a Soviet citizen in the Gulag camps. (Note that the difference in our treatment of "suspected terrorists", or people who have had contact with "terrorists" in other countries, at Guantanamo is a difference in degree, not in kind.)
In both cases, patriotic citizens were trained to consider collaborating with the police and armed forces in the elimination of these internal enemies as service to their countries. In both cases, the majority of citizens marched in lockstep. In both cases, individual rights were sacrificed in the name of a higher good, namely, security threats to the country.
In the words of Victor Klemperer, as written in April of 1938, "the main thing for tyrannies of any kind is the suppression of the urge to ask questions". Unfortunately, we are easily influenced by pressures on our loyalty and identity as Americans in a manner that disincentivizes questions about the political outcomes of our majoritarian democracy. In this lies the seed of totalitarianism. Sometimes "the will of the people" gets quite nasty indeed.
For more on the ideas explored in this essay:
- The works of James Buchanan on the hazards of non-contractarian majoritarian democracy are freely available online thanks to the Libert Fund's Online Library.
- Asesh Prasann has a very readable and interesting post about majoritarian democracy and nationalism in the political history of India.
- "Early Consolidation and Performance Crisis: The Majoritarian-Consensus Democracy Debate in Hungary" by Attila Agh examines the form of democracy in the Hungarian transition, as well as the political discourse surrounding it.
- Another great paper (excerpted from a book) on the issues with majoritarian democracy and ethnic "revival" in the Balkans.
- Edith Stone's article, "Buy the Right Kind of Democracy", provides a brief but thorough glance at the American tradition of majoritarian democracy and individual rights.
- A review of Richard Overy's book by Robert Service.
