Casting a Vote for Democracy
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Two new books by prominent social scientists concern themselves with the perils and promises of our democracy in these parlous times. They worry about different aspects of the crisis they diagnose and they bring different concerns to bear on our troubles, but when all is said and done, they rush to the same bottom line. Robert A. Dahl, the well-known author of “Who Governs?” “On Democracy,” and “How Democratic is the American Constitution?” draws on his whole life’s work in this short book, of whose brevity he is so proud that he refers to it three times in the first five pages.”On Political Equality” (Yale University Press, 142 pages, $24) has the feel of a summing up of Dahl’s distinguished career.
Mr. Dahl is a fervent advocate of political equality, which he almost equates with democracy itself; he accepts the natural or intrinsic equality of all human beings without question. His fervor seems limited only by his subscribing to the difference between what is and what ought to be (also known as the fact-value distinction), which has marked or plagued the profession Mr. Dahl has professed during his whole lifetime. He thus goes no further than insisting that political equality is a reasonable goal.
Is this goal achievable? It is not enough to be reasonable, for reason is not all that powerful in the face of feelings and passions. To count too much on the power of pure reason is to fall into the errors of Immanuel Kant, whom Mr. Dahl acknowledges as “one of the most distinguished philosophers of all time” but whom he suspects of being “somehow deprived of normal human feelings.” Mr. Dahl prefers John Rawls. Luckily, reason in this instance is supported by emotions such as empathy and sympathy, about which Mr. Dahl has learned not only from common sense experience but from capuchin monkeys.
Mr. Dahl is thus able to paint a sweeping picture of American progress in regard to political equality, a kind of tale of unfurling goodness from the bad old days of the Constitution, with its silence as to women, to the civil-rights triumphs of the 20th century. He does not hesitate to acknowledge — and even to emphasize — our sins of the past, so that a reader of “On Political Equality” can learn more about Thomas Jefferson’s shenanigans with his slave-mistress Sally Hemings than about Jefferson’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence.
The possibility of progress in political equality does not, however, mean that complete political equality is achievable. Mr. Dahl takes care to point to “persistent barriers to political equality,” such as the unequal distribution of political resources, skills, and incentives. The goal of political equality is reasonable because progress in nearing it has proved possible, but it is finally unattainable, no more than a dream, albeit a noble one.
Toward the end of this slender volume, clouds sometimes obscure its fundamental sunniness: “The future of political equality in democratic countries seems fraught with uncertainty.” Mr. Dahl compels himself to consider a possible increase of inequality, especially in America. He finds a necessary bond to exist between a modern democracy’s viability and an economy of “market capitalism,” but his investigations have convinced him that greater wealth does not necessarily produce greater “happiness”; at a certain point in development, what matters is satisfaction with the quality of one’s life.
That does not faze the author. For the reader’s benefit, Mr. Dahl includes a snazzy chart of “Reforms to Increase Political Equality in the United States.” It includes campaign finance reform expanding McCain-Feingold legislation, measures to enhance voter participation, safeguards against gerrymandering, universal healthcare, a raised minimum wage, and lots more.
Will all this do the trick? There seems to be something wrong with presentday America that goes beyond the power of a legislative agenda to fix. I return to the bottom line to which I have alluded: the supremacy of the Republican Party since 2000 and the Presidency of George W. Bush.
In “Does American Democracy Still Work?” (Yale University Press, 216 pages, $22),Alan Wolfe writes more passionately, and at times more profoundly about American politics than Mr. Dahl does. Less enamored of democracy than Mr. Dahl is, he can cast a cold eye on democracy’s past 40 years. But he is deeply concerned with the appearance of what he calls the new or conservative democracy, an unsavory blend of populism and moralism also known as the political right. Its growth is partly due to the weakness of its opposition, so that Mr. Wolfe can assert that democracy as it was practiced in 1964 was “anything but perfect,” but it has managed to make “discredited democracy seem like a golden age” (to borrow from Plato).
In five blistering chapters, Mr. Wolfe catalogues the sins of the new democracy. It is bringing about a democracy without information, in which complicated issues like abortion are hideously oversimplified; a democracy without accountability, in which competition for political leadership has declined and incumbents get a free ride; a democracy without institutions, in which political parties no longer play their proper role; a democracy without disinterest, in which partisan rancor displaces the influence of elites devoted to the public good, and a democracy without justice, in which social security is headed toward privatization (one assumes Mr. Wolfe has in mind personal savings accounts and not selling the whole kit and caboodle to Allstate), while on the world scene the explicit use of torture is endorsed.
There appears to be no end to Mr. Wolfe’s loathing of the Bush administration. One finds in this book a seemingly endless denunciation of things like stunning incompetence, the suppression of scientific research, callousness, and — of course — hostility toward social science findings. Mr. Wolfe pays a steep price for his aversions, a decline of the generosity of spirit of which he was once capable, and a repeated descent into mean-spiritedness. Thus in discussing the failure of the Senate to confirm Robert Bork for the Supreme Court in 1987, he concedes that liberals acted badly at the time but cannot refrain from adding that Mr. Bork’s subsequent best-selling books suggest he was not fit for the court in the first place. And in his discussion of the battle for the confirmation of Justices Roberts and Alito he denounces only those Senators who flirted with a “nuclear option” and not those who tried to block a vote altogether. Nor does Mr. Wolfe find any fault with the repulsive rhetoric during the hearings by Senators Schumer, Kennedy, and others.
It is almost superfluous to add that both Mr. Dahl and Mr. Wolfe have a rather jaundiced view of the war on terror. Mr. Wolfe dismisses it with the flippant remark that it is a war that will never cease because terror will never cease. Mr. Dahl also assumes that terrorism will persist and toys with something like its routinization: after all, 435,000 deaths are annually attributed to tobacco. To his credit, Mr. Dahl does not pursue a line of reasoning that would make smoking more than 140 times as costly as September 11, 2001.
These books appear shortly before an election many consider “critical.” We need hardly ask about the outcome they would prefer.
Mr. Dannhauser is a professor of government emeritus at Cornell University.