The crisis of democracy, revisited
I’m sitting in a posh lobby in the Atlanta Hilton, reading the tragicomic The Crisis of Democracy by Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. I picked it up mostly for the historical value, as the book that launched a thousand conspiracy theories about the Trilateral Commission. It’s an exceedingly odd book, not for what is said, but for what is not. Throughout the whole book, and particularly in the rather vapid piece by Michael Crozier on Western Europe, there is an unstated other, some degree of liberty-drunk citizens who desire anarchy. Samuel Huntington’s argument is more well-crafted, and goes a little something like this: There had been a sharp rise in political participation in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a rise in the amount of turmoil in the government; the former factor caused the latter, since too vigorous a democracy leads to political polarization and “democratic distemper”; the way to cure this distemper is to reduce the power of the masses.
It’s an odd argument, foremost because Huntington himself grudgingly admits that more “rational” explanation for the crises of the 1960s and 1970s “could conceivably be the specific policy problems confronting the US… and its inability to deal effectively with those problems.” With the distance of almost 40 years the book also seems somewhat incongruous, as the specific problems it worries about are long gone. Still, I’ve been mulling it over in my head, and the fundamental issue- how to structure a republic so the will of the majority doesn’t trample on the rights of the minority- will always remain a bit of balancing act.
In an odd way, this debate reminds me of the explorations in ecology of how species diversity affects stability. Such studies, both theoretical and empirical, are common in ecology. Generally, more species doesn’t equal more stability in species composition, and in fact the introduction of a new species inevitably changes the species composition to a lesser or greater degree (this is hard to predict, actually). However, having more species around does tend to increase the stability of (at least some) overall properties of the system like productivity simply because, in the event of a perturbation to the system, there are more entities to fill any gaps. In a similar way, I think Huntington is frustrated because the introduction of new political actors is changing the distribution of power among actors. This does not, however, necessarily imply that things like the constitutional process in the US are at risk. In fact, the broader distribution of power among more actors may increase the checks and balances in the system; this is, after all, what the Locke tradition is all about.
