Shadi Hamid has explored the prospects of "illiberal
democracy" in Temptations of
Democracy, a masterful work of political science in which he assesses the
agenda and fortunes of Islamists in the 'Arab Spring', especially in
Egypt. In a New York Times op-ed he
identifies the challenge the events present to the West:
This poses a thorny question for
Western observers: Do Arabs have the right to decide — through the democratic
process — that they would rather not be liberal?
An important question but at the same time an odd one,
because Western electorates have constantly decided - through the democratic
process - that they would rather not be liberal as well.
Though there must have been times when the American
electorate joyously endorsed liberal legislation, I can't think of a single
instance.* The liberal tendencies of American politics were imposed on the
people by the Bill of Rights, not voted
through their representatives. The
implementation of these rights generally involved the decisions of an unelected
Supreme Court and a good deal of political horse-trading far removed from the
electoral process. Americans were
virtually dragged kicking and screaming into liberal statutes on obscenity, the
right to organize trade unions, the right of adults to their sexual preferences,
and right to equal treatment for all races and sexes. Never was their resistance termed
undemocratic.
Defending the Bill of Rights has been the constant battle of
one of the most unpopular organizations in the United States, the American
Civil Liberties Union. You might ask
them how things have gone since 9-11.
Beyond this there are a constantly changing set of restrictions on
private life that go beyond traditional criminal law, especially in the realm
of pornography and sexual practices.
In Western Europe, illiberalism is much more prevalent, manifesting
itself in strong restrictions on racist or holocaust denial utterances,
religious dress and various forms of political advocacy.
Yet Hamid was quite right to ask his question, because
alleged 'liberals' (especially in Egypt) have loosed a tide of obfuscation
against the Islamist threat. We hear the
Islamists are undemocratic and that the liberals - who recently endorsed
murderous, vicious repression - are the true defenders of democracy, even of
'freedom'. However his is a work of
political science, more concerned with political realities than with the
distortion of that reality by ideologues.
What follows might serve as an appendix to his
writings. It sets out some very basic
ideas about democracy and liberalism that used to be plain to everyone. They have all but vanished due to wishful
thinking, self-deception and outright dishonesty. Restoring these ideas might make a dialogue
between Islamists and their opponents a bit more feasible. Perhaps more important, it could temper the
obsession with Islamists in Syria, which has induced panic in Western policy
makers. This panic, through its tendency
to choke off support for the Syrian revolution, is responsible for untold
horror.
I'll look at three questions: what is democracy, what is liberalism, and
how does these relate to something dreamed up in recent years,
'majoritarianism'? My spell-checker
wonders was that means.
democracy
Democracy has been clearly defined for hundreds of
years. It is government according to the
will of the people. The will of the
people is understood to be determined by voting. It is what the majority decides.
Democracy, therefore, is a procedure for making decisions.
It is a form of politics. There is nothing in democracy that guides
those decisions towards wisdom or insanity, good or evil. A terrible decision is every bit as
democratic as a wonderful decision.
Pure democracies are of course rare but clear cases of
democracy are not that rare. Their
purity isn't related to how respectful they are of individual rights. It's a matter of how closely they adhere to
the principle of majority rule. There
are many problems about this, most notably whether the people's will can really
be expressed through its elected representatives. Believers in democracy think it can. These questions of purity have been of
interest primarily to theorists.
Other questions have more practical importance. It sometimes takes centuries for an electoral
system to become democratic, and established democracies can corrupt
themselves. The corruption and the slow
pace of democratization have to do with deviations from majority rule such as
restricting the suffrage, or arranging electoral districts so that some voters
have more say than others. These
practices are undemocratic.
liberalism
Another undemocratic practice is the implementation of a
liberal agenda.
Liberalism defends the individual against 'the state' by
promoting rights, especially to freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and a
private sphere in which you can do as you like, provided you don't harm
others. Its progenitor, John Stuart
Mill, was quite aware that in a democracy, the promotion of these rights would
thwart the will of the majority. That
was his intention. Liberalism is not
only undemocratic, it is anti-democratic.
In other words, it is very odd indeed to ask if Islamists
have a right to create an illiberal democracy.
If they don't, they don't have the right to democracy at all, but only
to a system in which popular will, majority rule, is less than sovereign. Advocates of democracy might better ask
whether there can be a right to liberal democracy. Does the majority have the right to decide
what people are permitted to believe, to wear, to say, to do, perhaps on pain
of death? If your standard is
accordance with 'democratic values', they certainly do. Liberalism with its civil liberties is an
external *constraint* on democracy. That
is its anti-democratic nature.
It this seems shocking or perverse, it indicates
'democratic' has become an empty honorific.
The more genuinely democratic a government, the less reason there is to
assume its decisions are good. This is a
problem for rights advocates, including liberals, who can't bring themselves to
say that they reject the central, the only democratic 'value', belief in the
supremacy of the majority. They believe
that in many important cases, the majority should not reign supreme. Typically they refuse to say that, even to
themselves.
majoritarianism
From this dishonesty about the anti-democratic liberal
agenda comes 'majoritarianism'. It has
two meanings.
The first is 'the ideology of a democracy I don't
like'. Liberals like liberalism, so if a
majority were to enact anti-democratic liberal measures, that wouldn't be
called impure democracy. It would be
celebrated as democracy in its purest, highest form, a far cry from anything as
ignoble and vulgar as 'majoritarianism'.
But if an Islamist majority were to enact anti-liberal measures, that
would be distasteful. So as not to admit
that such a government would be democratic, indeed far more democratic than a
liberal government, it is called 'majoritarian'. That means exactly and precisely the same
thing as 'democratic', just as 'bitch' can mean exactly the same thing as 'woman'. It is merely a pejorative that, unlike
'bitch', hides its pejorative function.
If this sense of 'majoritarian' is sleazy, its other sense
is childishly absurd. In Egypt,
'majoritarian' is often applied to democratically elected administrations that don't
share power with the minority. Please
note this has absolutely nothing to do with the rights of *individuals* in the
minority. A majority might scrupulously
defend all the civil rights of all those individuals. It might never stray one micron from liberal
principles. No matter: it would still be
'majoritarian' in this second sense. To
avoid the label, it would have to give the minority *parties* a substantial say
in government.
Never mind that it is common (though not universal) practice
in Western democratic countries for an incoming administration to allocate to
itself as many government positions as possible. If it refrains from doing this it is praised
as 'bipartisan'. It's praised because that's supererogatory: it goes above and beyond the call of
political duty. No one calls a partisan
administration 'majoritarian' or suggests that its practices are
undemocratic. But in Egypt, this silly
suggestion passes for intelligence. A
Martian would find accusations of 'majoritarianism' as pathetically mortifying
as the excesses of Sisi-worship that bring shame on Egypt.
No doubt the liberal secularists have legitimate concerns
about Islamists, but being undemocratic isn't one of them. So are liberals. In Syria as in Egypt, it is wrong to demonize
Islamists just because, like liberals, they 'don't believe in democracy'.
Again, this applies equally well to liberals.
If a majority endorses an Islamist agenda, if it gives that
agenda 'democratic legitimacy', then liberal opponents have a problem that
isn't going to be addressed, much less solved, by talk about
'majoritarianism'. Liberals concerned
about Islamist rule will have to offer more than absurdities and special
pleading. With so bankrupt a response,
the inevitable consequence is that liberals line up with violent repression of
popular will. In Syria, in Egypt,
nonsense about who's democratic makes its own modest contribution to bloodshed.
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*maybe ending Prohibition, if it's liberal to want a
drink...
