Zakaria also worries that the fall of the old ruling class, with its ethic of duty, has put the nation at the mercy of fickle public opinion and cold market forces. American institutions have opened themselves up to what he calls“the great unwashed,” and the result has been the near-demise of responsible leadership. “Secure in their wealth or status,” Zakaria writes of the bygone elites, “these people tended to take a long-term—if proprietary—interest in the health of their town, city, or country. For all the elitism and privilege that accompanies such a world, American democracy was well served by public-spirited elites.” But no longer: “Today, when elites involve themselves in issues,” he laments, “it is entirely from a partisan perspective, often one related to some issue that affects them.”
Most of this yearning for the past is sorely overdone—one need only think of the“machine politics” that dominated American public life a hundred years ago. But Zakaria’s argument does draw upon a key insight: As American life has become more democratized, power has not necessarily gone to the people. Frequently it has been distributed among a new, less responsible class of elites: Lobbyists, campaign spin-doctors, and their ilk, the people who know how to sell to the masses, yet are rather less interested in determining what is best for them.
Zakaria’s fundamental assumption is that the old patrician elite knew what was best and worked to achieve it, while today’s leaders are consistent failures. As a result, Americans are unhappy with their government, do not trust their representatives, and believe special interests have too much power. This is questionable on both counts. It is all too easy to mistake popular discontent in a democracy for an indication that the system is falling apart. It can be argued that Americans have never been very happy with their government, even at times that we consider to have been the apex of American civic life. We have always believed special interests were conniving to mistreat us. Indeed, it is precisely this skepticism that has proven to be an effective popular check on elected leaders. But surely “trust in government” is greater now than it was in, say, the 1960s, especially among the young.
Moreover, it is important to recall that the founding principles and institutions of the American regime, as established in the United States Constitution, enjoy a much wider degree of consensus than those of almost every other country. While basic issues of sovereignty, national identity, and the distribution of power continue to challenge the democratic order in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere, it has been a long time since Americans seriously questioned the premises of their government. Zakaria describes an American politics in crisi—but is it really?
If the description is not self-evidently accurate, neither is his remedy self-evidently appealing. Zakaria knows, of course, that the old aristocracy will never return to power (and as an Indian-born Muslim living in America, he probably doesn’t want it to). And while on the one hand he assures us that “in many, many ways democratization has been an extraordinary, powerful force for good, breaking up oligarchies, revolutionizing businesses, bringing in and rewarding fresh talent, creating new industries, and perhaps most important, empowering individuals,” he writes that responsible decision-making can be accomplished only “by insulating some decision-makers from the intense pressures of interest groups, lobbies, and political campaignsׁthat is to say, from the intense pressures of democracy.”
Zakaria’s argument, in essence, is that elections, the very mechanism that ensures government accountability, should be more limited in their effect, and a far greater degree of discretionary power given to a group of experts who are less answerable to public opinion. Not surprisingly, then, he claims that the American institutions that work best are those most distant from public control; his favorite examples are the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve.
In keeping with his belief that the United States needs more apolitical governing bodies, Zakaria proposes an independent tax authority. For in his view, “The tax code has become time-consuming, complex, and expensive for a simple reason: Democratic politics.” His proposal, based on a plan by Princeton economist Alan Blinder, would have Congress give the tax authority “broad directions and guidelines, and on this basis it would prepare tax legislation. Congress would then vote on the bill but no amendments would be allowed.” This system,“although hardly flawless,” would “undoubtedly produce a better tax code than the one we have now.”
But this line of reasoning is too facile. The Federal Reserve is able to “work” better than Congress because its task is essentially computational; it is charged with a responsibility that is almost entirely technical. Alan Greenspan’s job would be far more difficult if he had to write the federal budget. And it is hard to imagine how exactly the Supreme Court functions better than Congress—surely not by any measure that takes note of the court’s official responsibility to interpret the Constitution. While the everyday work of Congress is certainly messy and inefficient, it actually manages to function rather well in broad terms, and it is far from clear which among its faults might be mitigated by the introduction of an unaccountable tax authority. Moreover, it is precisely the factional, interest-driven debate that serves to ensure that our legislators, more than any other branch of government, are doing their best to further the interests of their constituents, thereby preserving the Jeffersonian principle that governments must derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. It is their very responsiveness that lends democratic legitimacy to the less representative, more elite institutions which elected representatives are involved in fashioning, such as the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve.
There is another problem with Zakaria’s argument. While bemoaning the intellectual depravity of the masses, he largely overlooks the intellectual corruption of the elites. Indeed, one might rightly argue that we should be grateful for the democratic pressures that ensure that crucial policy decisions are influenced by American public opinion. Despite years of relentless assault by its leading intellectuals and much of the press, the American public remains fundamentally sensible about a great many matters, both foreign and domestic. It accepts, for example, the heavy burden of America’s international responsibilities, instinctively sensing that European anxieties are largely misplaced. It supports Israel, and holds other views and attitudes that would not fare well in most university faculty meetings. Without a great deal of knowledge of the particulars, the public seems to have an intuitive sense of the right direction. Unfortunately, Zakaria overlooks this, and as a result ends up taking a sensible point too far. In arguing that democracy, in America and elsewhere, ought to be limited because the people do not know their interests, he grossly underestimates the wisdom of democracy’s subjects, and vastly overestimates the wisdom of its leaders.
At first one wants to see Zakaria’s charmingly bold thesis succeed, for many of the ills he describes are real. But as the book progresses, the weakness of his evidence ends up bolstering the reader’s confidence in the very democracy under assault. Zakaria’s call for a more republican, less democratic democracy is a legitimate one, but his book ends up offering a program that is impractical and wrong.
In the end, liberal authoritarians are rather hard to come by, and does anyone really want to be ruled by them? Democracy, for all its faults, is still the best political system around, and fundamental to any true liberal freedom, at home and abroad.
Yuval Levin is a Senior Editor of The New Atlantis, and a staff member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.