Fit for Export?

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, by Fareed Zakaria (Norton, 256 pp., $24.95)

Mae West is said to have remarked that too much of a good thing can be wonderful. Fareed Zakaria, in this brilliant if imperfect new book, disagrees: He rather inclines to the view of Samuel Huntington, who once wrote that "a value which is normally good is not necessarily optimized when it is maximized." Zakaria aims this inclination at the notion of democracy, and not a moment too soon. It is impossible to pick up an American newspaper or magazine these days without reading some thinly veiled (and thinly reasoned) sermon on the imperative to democratize Iraq and, to listen to some, the rest of the Arab and Muslim worlds beyond. With but few exceptions, the sermonizers do not say what it is they actually mean by democracy -- and therein lies a problem. The essential message of Zakaria's book is that, popular conflations notwithstanding, constitutional liberalism is not the same as democracy. Rather, the former is ever the plinth of the latter: Without constitutional liberalism one cannot have, or at any rate have stably or for very long, anything remotely resembling genuine democracy.

Zakaria is right, and why shouldn't he be? He is only repeating what Montesquieu, Madison, and Tocqueville knew: Democracy unaccompanied by the social restraints of institutionalized liberalism (in the proper sense of that word) can lead to the tyranny of the majority, to populist demagogy, and to the relatively quick, and ugly, collapse of democracy itself. Writing not for scholars but for the broader educated (and currently confused) public, Zakaria wants to revive an understanding of American government that every high-school student used to have. That understanding posits that democracy requires certain "habits of the heart" (Robert Bellah's phrase), which take a long time to develop. These habits have to do with liberty before they have to do with democracy. Liberty consists of certain socially ratified individual rights that the state may not infringe: freedom of speech, assembly, and conscience, constitutionally enshrined; and the sanctity of contracts and the rule of law, enforced by an independent judiciary. Liberty must precede and undergird genuine democracy -- which, when you get right down to it, is only a process for electing leaders; it says little about the content of public philosophy. But, alas, liberty is a word that has practically fallen out of contemporary usage, and is wrongly thought to be synonymous with freedom.

Zakaria notes that when Americans speak of democracy, what they really mean is liberal democracy, but they devalue the adjective before the noun. Since liberty and democracy have been organically entwined in the American experience, Americans are not adroit at separating out the parts, especially when impassioned by their famous urge to do good as unreconstructed innocents abroad. Unless we get better at it, Zakaria suggests, we may do ourselves and others much inadvertent harm and, worse, misapprehend the causes of the malaise in our civic culture at home.

The Future of Freedom grew out of a much-discussed Foreign Affairs essay published in 1997, when Zakaria was managing editor of that magazine. At the time, the debate over Zakaria's thesis was a "glass half-empty" versus "glass half-full" sort of affair, living in the ether of the secular theology of the Scottish Enlightenment. Zakaria generally got the better of his critics, but he must have wondered whether the full power of his argument was yet deployed. In any event, the present book is not just a padded extension of that essay. He has instead deepened and extended his analysis considerably, as a summary of the book's six substantive chapters shows.

Zakaria begins with "A Brief History of Human Liberty," comparing and contrasting the historical experiences of Britain, France, and Germany over roughly the past four centuries. He shows through a quick review of a great deal of social and political history that constitutional liberalism and democracy are indeed not the same thing. The chapter sets the stage for Chapter 2, "The Twisted Path," in which Zakaria shows how democratic forms -- when they lacked their necessary liberal predicates -- gave rise in the 20th century to fascism. He also presents the well-known data indicating that the sorts of liberal institutions that form the bedrock of stable democracies are unlikely to form if there is no independent-minded middle class.

Chapter 3, "Illiberal Democracy," brings the analysis to a geographically wider present, with a focus on Russia, China, and, most enlightening of all, India -- the site of Zakaria's birth and youth. Chapter 4 focuses on what Zakaria calls "the great exception" -- namely, the Muslim and particularly the Arab world. While he gets several small points wrong, what he gets right far outweighs his errors. Scholars will complain, with some justification, of simplifications and exaggerations, sins of commission and omission alike. But this will miss the point. For the readers to whom Zakaria is appealing, there is more good and practical sense in this chapter than in virtually any recent account of the Muslim Middle East I have read - - whether on the debilitating rentier effects of oil wealth, on the futility of stressing religious as opposed to economic and political reform, on terrorism as a symptom of political and social dysfunction rather than as a direct outgrowth of Islam, on the core differences between Iran and the Arab countries, and on more besides. The aforementioned sermonizers should master this chapter before uttering or writing a single additional word of their own.

I confess -- full disclosure -- a special affection for this chapter because it allies with an effort of my own. In the Fall 2002 issue of The National Interest, I strained to temper the enthusiasm of the would-be democratizers of the Arabs with an appeal to the formidable obstacles of perduring culture and recent history. I stressed that Arab democratization, while not an impossible task, requires prerequisite attitudes and institutions that render it difficult, and that put it well beyond any practical timetable as a solution for the present problem of mass-casualty terrorism. Zakaria has gone about it a little differently, but his basic message is the same: "The process of genuine liberalization and democratization is gradual and long-term," and it is more important that governments "be judged by yardsticks related to constitutional liberalism" than by elections held. Zakaria argues that countries such as Jordan, Tunisia, and Singapore, which have made progress in building liberal institutions, are far more likely, in time, to achieve true democracy than such countries as Russia, Venezuela, or Ghana -- even though the latter are technically democratic today and the former are not.

All true; but are Americans equipped by intellect and temperament these days to understand this? Zakaria is skeptical, for he devotes his final two chapters, "Too Much of a Good Thing" and "The Death of Authority," and part of a brief but rousing conclusion, to what has gone wrong with American civic culture. And what has gone wrong, in a nutshell, is that we have too much regulated capitalism and, more important, too much de- regulated democracy.

Appearances notwithstanding, these chapters are integral to the book. Zakaria has done what few writers nowadays, specialized as most of us are in either domestic or international politics, even try: to link general trends in political thinking in one country to related trends in the wider world. He shows how the undifferentiated urge to openness, combined with the kindred pressures of marketization, has transformed American civic culture over the past four decades -- much for the worse. Along the way he illustrates the critical importance in a liberal democracy of public-spirited elites, particularly the sort with which the Anglo-American world has traditionally been blessed, but that has recently gone missing. His analysis ranges from the sclerosis of the Congress to the dysfunctional effects of the mass proliferation of credit to the decay of the ethos of the professions -- all the unintended consequences of well-intentioned democratic reforms. What Zakaria will have achieved in these chapters, for most readers, is not the revelation of new knowledge, but something more important: a concentrated reminder of facts already known, but presented in such a way that the analytical sum far exceeds a usually dim and disconnected awareness of the parts.

Alas, just as some essays are too long these days, some books are too short. By choosing to write for the largest feasible audience, Zakaria has packed into just 256 pages what by rights should take about twice as many pages to do properly. In a sense, his otherwise remarkably eclectic and lucid effort is an example of the excess of democracy about which he complains, but this is a small sin easily forgiven. Others will no doubt accuse him of being an anti-democratic elitist, and that will be unfair. But he will stand thus accused because, whether he knows it or not, he has written a deeply conservative book in the best, Burkean sense of the word. And that, of course, some will never forgive.

That is why, in at least one important sense, the book is too short. The decay of America's liberal-democratic civic culture, which Zakaria charts so persuasively, is not just coincidentally related to the phenomenon of illiberal democracy in the world. How could it be, given the power of the United States, and the interpretations of democratic ascendancy bequeathed by the reigning version of how the Cold War ended? No, the relationship is quite causal, but Zakaria does not make this explicit enough, and he thus fails even to ask the most crucial question of all: What does it mean, for itself as well as for others, that the United States has reached a peak of international power precisely at the time when its own liberal-democratic civic culture is in decline? Put a little differently, what might be the effect of the American colossus's trying to spread a political idea it holds so dear to its own heart, but that it has come fundamentally to misunderstand? And spread in the Middle East, of all places! Oh, that The Future of Freedom had been given a seventh chapter dedicated to this question; then, perhaps, we all might have rested easier.