Ex Post Facto

Reading: Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs (Nov./Dec., 1997).

I’ve assigned this article in a course on the “Early American Republic” in order to aid our consideration of the long-term historical consequences of this period in U.S. history. Zakaria focuses his inquiry on such political constructs as democracy, liberalism, and constitutionalism. The founders of the United States did not invent these ideas, but they did play a central historical role in fusing them into an enduring national government that has often (although by no means unerringly) expanded and protected minority rights.

By the 1820s and 1830s, the constitutional republic set into motion by the 1787 Philadelphia convention had become a democracy for white men, complete with an ample ideology to explain precisely why it was that white men — and not others — deserved the right to elect their own leaders. Despite a variety of moments during which constitutional restraints were stretched and even broken, by and large the United States remained a constitutional democracy up to American Civil War. During this period, most American political discussions took place with the understanding that the Constitution circumscribed the power of the federal government and protected the rights of American citizens.

The democracy of the early U.S. had its illiberal features. The fact that women, Indians, and African Americans lacked rights and power was no accident — to be sure — but in the North especially, where concern about slavery’s future did not inspire a cultural lock-down, women and African Americans could find spaces (often in churches) within which they could speak and act politically in hope of expanding their rights.

The United States, then, is not (and was not) simply a democracy — a nation ruled by its people. It is a liberal or constitutional democracy whose founding documents profess respect for rule of law and for individual rights.

At this juncture, it is worth asking the question again: how and why did the founding generation create a government of limited power, a government that would pursue the will of the majority while also respecting the rights of political minorities (if not, at first, other kinds of minorities)? To what extent were the founders successful in this project?

Zakaria writes with great respect for constitutional liberalism, which can and sometimes has, even in the absence of democracy, helped protect individual liberty. He expresses concern for the rise, since the end of the Cold War, of a substantial number of democracies that lack constitutional safeguards and that fail to protect individual rights and liberties — he calls these states “illiberal democracies.” Illiberal democracies, he argues, are prone to war, unfriendly to economic development (capitalism), and have with some frequency led to ethnic cleansing and similar atrocities. We need to be careful, he warns, not to mistake democracy as the only political virtue. A democracy without liberal, constitutional limitations on its power can do serious damage to its own people, to other nations, and to the reputation of democracy itself.

In short, Zakaria concludes that democracy should not be seen as an end, in and of itself. Constitutional liberalism, rather, posits the proper end or goal of a government, and democracy is only one way of reaching that goal. In making this point, Zakaria does not mean to defend autocratical forms of government, yet he is properly sensitive to the fact that democracy may not be the right form of government at all times in all places. Both self-government and liberalism have deep roots in western culture, especially in Anglo-American culture and society. The democratic republic that gradually emerged within the U.S. did not develop overnight. Zakaria implies that it would be folly to expect developing nations today to embrace full-fledged, functional democracy simply because they have the means in place to hold elections. (He wrote this essay well before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. and the subsequent invasion of Iraq; it’s hard not see his concerns as prescient.)