The Bookshelves Project--during which I will be giving up reading new books in favor of spending some time with the books already on our shelves--officially begins as soon as I'm done with all the books I currently have home from the library plus the five on my hold list (though there may be a little overlap as some of the books on my hold list have been in the dreaded Tech Processing area forever). I'll let you know when The Bookshelves Project begins; it will be its own weblog, probably starting in June. But for now, the regular reading goes on.
I have just finihsed The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria. Zakaria looks at the historical phenomenon of democracies that do not produce liberal societies ("After all, Hitler was elected!") and examines the factors that lead some democracies to elect highly authoritarian and even repressive regimes. The answers have to do with everything from average income to the role of religion and ethnicity in a culture to how repressive the previous regime was, whether colonial, communist, monarchy, or something else entirely.
I have a bachelor's degree in Poli Sci from the University of Michigan, and an M.A. in the subject from Rutgers, and I tend to see that whole episode as a mistaken detour on my path to life as a student, teacher, and practitioner of English. But reading Zakaria reminded me that there were things I loved about Political Science for it's own sake; I found the historical analysis fascinating. The contemporary stuff on what's wrong with American democracy today and how it can be fixed, was less compelling for me, though I found Zakaria's explanation of why very small intereste groups can exert enormous pressure on government interesting. His point is that the power of small groups is bad, since it forces governments to practice bad, short-sighted politics. Since I can't find the quote, I'll paraphrase him on how it works: Imagine you have 100 farmers who benefit from an outdated government program, like the mohair subsidy that dates back to World War II, when wool was a strategic commodity (used to make uniforms) and the government wanted to encourage its production. Say each farmer stands to get about $100,000 in benefits from this program; that costs each of the rest of us about 4 cents a year. "Which group, the hundred farmers or the other 270 million of us, do you suppose will form a lobby?"
I found most of Zakaria's argument persuasive. He says that a limited, indirect democracy as envisioned by the founders of our country is in many ways more effective than the more direct democracy we have been drifting into in recent decades. As is often the case, however, whenever he drifted into an area I have some expertise in, I was aware of gaps and oversimplifications in his discussion. These are inevitable in a broad survey aimed at a general audience, but it always makes me wonder what gaps and oversimplifications I don't see in the aspects of the argument I'm less familiar with. And that, in turn, makes me wonder whether I would be as persuaded by a more complete and scholarly version of this same work.
Posted by Su Penn at May 31, 2003 09:10 PM | TrackBack