It seems that everyone is reviewing Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. In Guarding Liberty from Democracy, Roger Scruton, of The American Conservative, takes his turn:
Ancient writers on political themes would seldom recommend a purely democratic constitution on the grounds that, unless checked by powerful countervailing forces, democracy could at any moment degenerate into mob rule. The argument was refined by later thinkers, and notably in the 19th century by Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, both of whom warned against the “tyranny of the majority.” Unless the constitution protects the rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities, they argued, democratic choice could threaten anyone at any time — as it did in Hitler’s Germany. Put another way, the argument tells us that there is nothing inherently liberal in popular choice and that individual freedom might be better protected under an aristocracy than when exposed to the whims of democratic resentment. Indeed, that is what Edmund Burke thought and what he showed to be the case in his great study of the French Revolution.
Scruton’s review turns decidedly…conservative:
In this well-argued and far-ranging survey, Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria shows the damage that is being done by this un-nuanced pursuit of the democratic idea and argues once again for a society in which elites are accorded their proper place and esteemed for what they are — the true guardians of individual freedom and the ones who have the greatest stake in maintaining law, order, and accountability in the public realm. His argument is particularly pertinent now, when allied forces are attempting to bring freedom to Iraq by imposing democratic procedures on its people.
Here’s the true core of Zakaria’s argument:
Elected dictatorships, which extinguish opposition, destroy the political process too. It is only where people are free to dissent that genuine democratic choice is possible. Hence liberty should come higher than democracy in the wish list of our politicians. You can have liberty without democracy, but not democracy without liberty: such is the lesson of European history. Before imposing democratic regimes, therefore, we should ensure that civil liberty is properly entrenched in a rule of law, a rotation of offices, and the freedom to dissent. These institutions tend to arise naturally, Zakaria argues, with the emergence of a socially mobile middle class. That is why the transition to democracy is successful in countries with a per capita GDP of $3,000 to $6,000 but not in countries where it is significantly less.The argument here is pertinent and fascinating. As Zakaria makes clear, there is all the difference in the world between a country where this relatively high GDP is achieved by the enterprise of the citizens and a country where it comes simply from selling off some natural resource like oil. The high GDP of Saudi Arabia is a kind of political illusion since it does nothing to indicate the emergence of a resourceful middle class or the demand for freedom, law, and citizenship that such a class will inevitably make. Thanks to oil, Saudi Arabia exists in a state of feudal hypostasis, even though it can treat its citizens — who are not true citizens but subjects — to a middle-class lifestyle.