Conquest on Democracy

Robert Conquest, writing in The National Interest has an interesting cautionary piece on the strengths and limitations of democracy.

In it he makes several salient points, to wit:

That democracy is not the only, or inevitable, criterion of social progress is obvious. If free elections give power to a repression of consensuality, they are worse than useless.

"Democracy" is often given as the essential definition of Western political culture. At the same time, it is applied to other areas of the world in a formal and misleading way. So we are told to regard more or less uncritically the legitimacy of any regime in which a majority has thus won an election. But "democracy" did not develop or become viable in the West until quite a time after a law-and-liberty polity had emerged.

Regarding the different forms of democratic governments, he writes:

It seems that the main thing they share is not so much the institutions as the habits of mind, which are far more crucial, and, above all, the acceptance of the traditional rules of the political game."

Here's something that many bloggers should read and take to heart:

Democracy cannot work without a fair level of political and social stability. This implies a certain amount of political apathy. Anything resembling fanaticism, a domination of the normal internal debate by "activists" is plainly to be deplored. And democracy must accept anomalies.

And this too:

All the major troubles we have had in the last half century have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania.

And this:

Democracy is almost invariably criticized by revolutionaries for the blemishes found in any real example, as compared with the grand abstraction of the mere word. Real politics is full of what it would be charitable to call imperfections. And there are those who, often without knowing it, become apologists and finally accomplices of the closing of society

For those who champion international agreements embodying abstract principles:

[W]e...need to be careful about the signing of international treaties and the acceptance of international tribunals that appeal to a certain internationalist idealism, but one that needs to be carefully deployed. It is surely right to note that the acceptance of international obligations, and nowadays especially those affecting the policies, interests and traditional rights and powers of the states of established law and liberty, must be preceded by, at the least, negotiation that is careful, skeptical and unaffected by superficial generalities, however attractive at first sight. Permitting international bodies to intrude into the law-and-liberty countries also involves the institutionalization, on purely abstract grounds, of an as yet primitive apparat.

There's a great deal of wisdom here. Robert Conquest has spent most of his adult life studying the varieties of oppression and terror that have afflicted our modern age. Clearly he has learned some important and cogent lessons. Read the whole thing here.

For links to other writings by this important thinker go here.

One of the things that gives me hope about Bush's initiative is that he has consistently emphasized "freedom" as opposed to "democracy" and insisted that majority rule must be leavened with tolerance and pluralism.