Defining Democracy Down

Bush has been criticized for being a radical utopian, seeking to spread democracy through force, regardless of the initial destruction it wreaks. The most common left-wing objections have been either that Bush is doing this wrong – needing more multilateral support, and more troops – or that he is just dressing up imperial pretensions in agreeable rhetoric. Both of these criticisms miss the point. No amount of multilateral support will get you democracy – just look at the European Raj in the Balkans, where ten years out, the High Representative (currently Paddy Ashdown) still rules in a truly arbitrary fashion, summarily dismissing elected officials, forcing through laws, censoring speech and interfering with the electoral process. Moreover, the cynical ‘imperial ideology’ critique misses the real ideological gesture in this whole affair.

It is not that Bush is covering up the pursuit of interests, but that Bush is carrying forward a project whereby democracy is equated with mere security. The ‘democracy’ that Bush is exporting is more or less seen as the absence of tyranny, not the means by which a people collectively organize their social life and determine their future. Bush is not alone in this view. Clinton, too, tended to equate democratization with a few procedural safeguards against arbitrary power. In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, the humanitarian David Rieff wrote that ‘American interventionism has historically been a bipartisan impulse’ and that ‘few Democrats question the idea that it is right for the United States to "promote" democracy in the world, by force if necessary.’

The real meaning of this consensus around democracy promotion came out clearly in an LATimes article, published yesterday, about declining support for Bush’s ‘vision’. Towards the end of the article, the LATimes reports on a bipartisan bill, proposed last year by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) and Representative Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), that ‘would make promoting democracy a fundamental component of U.S. foreign policy’. The bipartisanship alone isn’t a surprise. The money-line comes when Lantos is asked what kind of democracy we’re talking about:

“The use of the term 'democracy' must undergo a dramatic transformation in dealing with countries like Iraq, Afghanistan or many other countries in the world… When you define the goal in more realistic terms — less brutality, fewer killings, fewer gulags, a society that's somewhat more open and tolerant — that's not just a plausible long-term policy, but the only long-term policy for the United States.”

In other words, Iraqis, Afghanis and really the whole Third World should lower their expectations (ie be ‘more realistic’) when thinking about democracy: forget about collective liberty, think of it more as a barrier against the worst forms of cruelty. Moreover, while cast as ‘democracy for them’, this defining down of democracy as ‘fewer killings’ also alters our own expectations back at home. It’s an attempt to bring our understanding of democracy in line with the survivalist, security-obsessed mentality of our political leaders. This is the real ideology in democracy promotion, and criticism of Bush for being too utopian only further lowers expectations. Best to reject these 'realistic goals' for unreasonably asking us to demand less, not more, of politics. Surely there's more to democracy, and life in general, than 'fewer killings, fewer gulags'.