Radical Liberals currently have a majority opinion criticizing democracy
The Divorce of Democracy and Freedom
Radical Liberals currently have a predominantly critical view of democracy.
This fact is surprising insofar as the liberal idea and the modern democratic idea, both emerging from the enlightenment, developed simultaneously and were then defended by the same actors.This is evidenced, among other things, by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, which is based both on the one and the other.
Paradoxical in view of the historical origins of contemporary ideas, this fact can be explained much better by examining the principles associated with the two ideologies and the consequences of their application.
First of all, in their very statement, democracy and liberalism are distinct.
Concretely this means that the liberal and the democrat will be able to defend completely opposite solutions in a particular case. While one teaches that each must decide for himself, the other affirms that the law of the majority imposes itself on the minority. Democratic decisions are as likely to encroach on freedoms as to protect them.
Second, the Liberals had strong reasons to be disappointed by the recent evolution of democratic societies, which saw, among other things, a sharp increase in the State's control over the economy and the relatively frequent use of judicial Opinions.
Why they should be brought closer together.
We believe, however, that these elements do not necessarily lead to condemning democracy from a liberal point of view.
Since this is the solution to the rejection of democracy by the Liberals, let us first try to represent the functioning of a liberal and undemocratic state.
The liberal rules of society would be intangible and fixed once and for all without the population having the slightest right of control over them. If the majority of the population were satisfied with these rules, there would be no problem a priori. Yet one can assume that a majority opinion challenging the intangibility of legal liberalism will take shape at one time or another. Moreover, the liberalism of power will be all the more likely to be challenged by public opinion as it will be presented as immutable. What is forbidden becomes all the more desirable. How will the government be able to maintain this liberal mode of operation in the face of growing protest? Should it, against its own principles, resort to a restriction of the freedoms of manifestations or expression or even more direct violence?
A second danger is that the statesmen guarantor of its liberal functioning will be able to exercise power to their advantage. In the end, there will be no guarantee that the people exercising the power will defend liberalism, the only certainty being that they have succeeded in gaining access to it in a competition foreign to any contradictory debate.
In short, a state constituted from a non-democratic liberal perspective would be more likely to infringe liberties than a democratic regime without institutionalized liberal guarantees.Democracy could be the only peaceful way of resolving conflicts, a good to which the Liberal should prefer what he considers a priori to be the best. The best system being a regime of liberal democracy, that is, requiring complex and solemn institutional procedures for the majority of the population to question certain freedoms.
It is possible to draw a parallel here with the judicial procedure. In theory, a good judicial decision, especially in criminal matters, is one which condemns the culprit and restores the innocent to his rights.
Yet man does not have any organs that would allow him to know a priori and clearly the truth of a judicial case, especially when the accused person protests his innocence. He will therefore have to rely on a method which will enable him to have as much chance as possible to accede to this truth: a contradictory procedure in which the arguments of both parties will be discussed at length. In spite of everything, the decision made will not always correspond to the truth.
Democracy is likewise a procedure for the selection of public policies that is likely to move away from the liberal truth but which will have the greatest chance of approaching it.
These advantages of democracy do not in any way prevent recognition of the specific risks that it may pose for freedoms.
The dangers of democracy
It is in the relations between the majority and minorities that democracy presents the greatest dangers.
The majority may feel little concerned with defending the rights of minorities, or even feeding them against hatred or desires for spoliation.
It is an extremely dangerous circumstance for the freedoms of all and not only minorities. Then the majority people are no longer able to lucidly appreciate their interests and they will think themselves happy if their freedoms were less affected than those of the minority. This attitude can be explained because all his passions are turned towards the hostility he feeds towards the minority, the oppression he undergoes will seem to him negligible compared to his satisfaction to see the war against When he does not regard the former as a consequence of the measures necessary for the second.
Such a mechanism probably explains the success of Nazi Germany: this totalitarian ideology suppressing all the freedoms of the individual has seduced the crowds by welding them against the enemies that it designated.
Similarly, and to a much lesser extent, in our social democracies, the people become indifferent to the heavy taxes they suffer because they believe that the rich will pay more and that they will ultimately benefit from the generalized spoliation.
This phenomenon is far from being systematic and very often the population is aware that it risks being the victim of the measures taken against a certain category. Thus, lately Washington voters in the United States refused the principle of a special tax rate that would have hit exclusively the richest 2%.
Democracy remains the best guarantee of freedoms
Thus, on average, democratic regimes are those where individual freedoms are best respected.On average we write, only a few exceptions prevented us from writing "systematically".
Let us measure the phenomenon by observing the nature of the regimes applied to the countries in the top ten and the last ten for the freedoms of the press and economic freedoms.
Democracies, in contrast to dictatorships, are in bold.
Freedom of the press ( Reporter Sans Frontière ranking ):
Top Ten List:
Finland Iceland Norway Netherlands Sweden Switzerland Austria New Zealand Estonia Ireland
Finland Iceland Norway Netherlands Sweden Switzerland Austria New Zealand Estonia Ireland
List of the last ten:
Rwanda Yemen China Sudan Syria Burma Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Eritrea
Rwanda Yemen China Sudan Syria Burma Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Eritrea
Economic Freedom ( Heritage Foundation ):
Top Ten List:
Hong Kong Singapore Australia New Zealand Switzerland Canada Ireland Denmark United States Bahrain
List of the last ten:
Timor-Leste , Iran, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Burma, Venezuela, Eritrea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea.
If one considers that the ideal score for democracies would be to occupy the top ten places and to be absent from the last ten (all occupied by dictatorships), their overall success rate in this respect is 20 Out of 20 in freedom of the press and 16 out of 20 in economic freedoms.
Whatever their shortcomings, democracies are indeed the regimes in which freedom is best preserved in practice.
Hadrien Gournay
Hadrien Gournay is an analyst for counterpoints
published on 03/04/2011
Hadrien Gournay
Hadrien Gournay is an analyst for counterpoints
published on 03/04/2011
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