Defining Democracy Down Part 2

Since Woodrow Wilson, American statesmen have made democracy promotion a part of their official ideology and aims. As we discussed in a prior post, this embrace has gone hand in hand with a tendency to 'define democracy down'. One of the peculiarities of this tendency is that politicians cast their project as 'idealist', as if they were defending high-minded ideals against realist pessimists. Yet their actual vision of democracy is deeply limited.

This anti-utopian mood was in evidence in Francis Fukuyama's recent article in the New York Times Magazine. In it, he claimed to be defending foreign policy idealism from the bad name neoconservatives had given it. But the best defense of democratic institutions he could give was that they help in 'alleviating poverty...dealing with pandemics [and] controlling violent conflicts.' This is a view of democratization that fits well with the security-obsessed mentality of the war on terror. Fukuyama's vision of democracy is a beefed up version of FEMA.