Conservatives Agree on Democracy?
by Donald Devine
Issue 101 - February 13, 2008

With all of the disagreement among conservatives these days, can we agree on one thing—that democracy is not our ideal?

America's Founders certainly would. As James Madison put it in Federalist #10:

democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

Of course, the Founders were not opposed to rule by the people. But they opposed the ideal of what Madison called “pure democracy”--a small number of people who meet and rule directly--and the whole underlying rationale for democracy itself. Those supporting democracy generally, Madison continued, “have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to perfect equality in their political rights, they would at the same time be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions and their passions.” Rather than demanding uniformity to majority desires, Madison insisted that human nature is diverse and that the principal job of government is to protect that diversity, that freedom. The “great object” of the Constitution was to prevent either minority or majority abuses of liberty and “at the same time preserve the spirit and the form of popular government.”

The solution was to create a “proper structure” for the government that gave the people a say in elections but used competing political and legal institutions to balance off their divergent ambitions. As Madison put it in Federalist #51, “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

In the compound republic of America, power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments and then the portion allocated to each subdivided among distinct and separated departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

So the object of government to the Founders was to protect the free rights of the people by controlling the power of all to abuse them, including the people. Freedom was chosen over democracy. With the “double security” of states and national governments and separation of power within both, with many conflicting interests in a large enough society and representative rather than direct democracy, the rights of the people can be protected by “a proper federal system” that balances the diverse powers of the society to protect everyone’s liberties.

It is true that over time the populist and progressive movements have moved the United States closer to, respectively, more democracy and then more centralized power, with Woodrow Wilson having the explicit goal of removing the “radical defect” in the Constitution “that it parcels out power and confuses responsibility.” But by-and-large the checks on democracy have endured, even with the general support of the people, who generally have understood they themselves needed limits to protect their freedom. Even the clumsy but effective Electoral College has been preserved to limit direct majority rule, as many found to their amazement in 2000 when George W. Bush won the election while losing the national popular vote. Indeed, Americans seem to have generally been suspicious of too much democracy at home, with polls consistently showing a preference for freedom over equality or direct democracy.

What about democracy abroad? Here the public is more ambiguous, the Pew Research Center showing U.S. popular support for promoting democracy abroad but also reporting that only a quarter of Americans want to make this a priority for their foreign policy. The venerable Sharon Statement of conservative principles held that foreign relations should be based not upon abstract ideology or upon a nation’s internal make-up and beliefs, including whether they were democratic or not, but upon what was in “the just interests of the United States.” That is pretty much what the U.S. has done historically, at least until post 9/11 when the Bush Administration originally set achieving world democracy as the preeminent goal. But that policy soon changed in the face of foreign policy realities.

As Daniel Pipes says in this issue (www.acuf.org/issues/issue101/080211cul.asp), “encouraging democracy is clearly a worthy goal, but when the Middle East's dominant popular force is totalitarian Islam, is it such a great idea to rush head-long ahead? Yet rushing ahead characterized Washington's initial approach [in Iraq]–until the policy's damage to U.S. interests became too apparent to ignore, causing it largely to be abandoned.” Support for regional U.S. interests that could be supplied only by authoritarians such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdallah and Jordan’s King Abdallah II could not be ignored and national interest returned as the U.S. foreign policy standard.

Pakistan is another example. It is ruled by a former army general who seized power in a coup and has governed autocratically ever since, Pervez Musharraf. After first not-so-democratically re-electing himself as president by his old parliament, he then scheduled legislative elections. But that hardly makes it democratic. Pakistan’s long-term democracy score from the authoritative Freedom House rating organization is a mere two (on its “electoral process” scale of a possible 12). Even if the upcoming election were amazingly conducted fairly and openly, beyond the ballot box is something else. Political scientist Rasul Bakdsh Rais of Lahore University notes that the political parties are family-based, that many parliamentary seats have been held by the same families (often covering both parties) since the country’s inception, and only two national leaders have been elected democratically, Benazar Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, both heads of regionally prominent aristocracies. The professor is not reluctant to describe Pakistan’s system as feudal. Whatever it is, American interests require Musharraf’s support in the war on terror, overlooking his many departures from democracy, even while trying gracefully to urge him in that direction.

The recent events in Kenya are likewise instructive. Freedom House rated Kenya with a nine score on democracy, compared to an eleven for the U.S. Ok, not so bad with a 75 percent democracy score. As J. Peter Pham of the Nelson Institute of Public Affairs at James Madison University noted, “ If, outside the atypical case of South Africa, any country in Africa was viewed as an island of stability with a real shot at breaking free of the ‘development traps’ which have ensnared the most of the continent, it was Kenya.” Yet after its disputed December 27, 2007 election, the country erupted in wholesale ethnic violence that has not abated much to this day. Is it democratic? The response of the democracy-promoting Freedom House was to issue a news release on January 3, 2008 removing Kenya from its democracy list!

Holding elections is easy. Creating a working rule of law and supporting culture that also allows for a system of checks and balances are essential but there are few of these. Even the “atypical” Union of South Africa scores only minutely higher than Kenya on the democracy rating, although it is much higher in Freedom House’s overall rating on freedom, with Kenya at 3.0 and South Africa at 2.0 (a score of 1.0 to 2.5 is called “free,” 3.0 to 4.5 is “partially free,” and 5.0-7.0 is “not free”). So being democratic does not separate the two—100 plus countries today are at least nominally democratic—but “free” is also rated too broadly. South Africa is a one party state and although it has the best government in the region it has tribal divisions similar to Kenya’s that could boil to the surface in the future. Even a 1.5 score is questionable as truly “free.” Ghana, for example, has this score but has had only one peaceful change of leaders after two coups and a long rule by Lt. Jerry Rawlings. Ghana has maintained its constitution since 1992 but as recently as 1994-95 land disputes in the north erupted into ethnic violence, resulting in 1,000 deaths and the displacement of a further 150,000 people.

If democracy does not differentiate very well, what about using the degree of freedom a nation has to decide who is friend or foe instead of how democratic they are? On the narrow 1.0 definition of freedom, not one nation on the list is the remotest threat to U.S. interests and most are allies already. Yet, if the U.S, only chose the truly free as allies, it would only have a few and they would not be very geographically disbursed. What about pushing the rest of the nations to become truly free so they could become future allies? The list of 1.0’s has remained stable (except for the addition of Eastern Europe with the fall of the Soviet Union and a few micro islands) for a half century and the prospects for admission are few and far between. It seems that selecting allies based on national interest rather than beliefs is not only the conservative and historical U.S. way but the only rational way.

In fact, the overwhelming majority with the 1.0 freedom score are European or of European origin, like the U.S. Only these really deserve to be called “free.” But rating agencies do not want to appear ethnocentric so the definition of free is applied very broadly—but inaccurately. Face it, the Freedom House 1.0 rating measures something like what the Founders wanted. Indeed, the whole rating could be called the “Westernness” Rating, measuring the degree to which countries meet the Western ideals of rule of law, separation of powers, limited government, popular participation, individualism balanced by community responsibilities, respect for tradition in private and public institutions, social diversity and rational discussion, and free elections—all of which are components in the rating.

The Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation study of world economic data finds conclusively that freedom correlates highly with prosperity and a World Bank study (summarized in the Chart below) demonstrates that possession of these Western ideals lead to prosperity. The Chart shows that democracy (called “citizen Voice”) is actually somewhat negatively correlated with economic growth (as Madison expected and for the same reasons). The number of students receiving education does not explain much (it depends on what is taught). Government policy is very important but it is its legal institutions that limit government power and promote the rule of law that positively promote prosperity. Indeed, more government spending is highly negatively correlated to prosperity. It is not democracy but the institutions of freedom and the values that support them that lead to success. As Pipes makes clear, only individualism and ordered freedom can solve the intractable problems that exist in the Middle East, and the World Bank data reported here suggest that is also so elsewhere throughout the world.

So, are we all agreed? It is not democracy but freedom and limited government that we admire in domestic affairs and, in foreign policy, decisions must be based on just interests rather than either?

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.