THE US

Defective democracy

Clinton’s national security advisor, Anthony Lake, is encouraging the
enlargement of democracy overseas. Should he extend that to the
US?

I can’t tell you what Anthony Lake has in mind, but the concept
of democracy that’s been advanced is a very special one, and the
more honest people on the right describe it rather accurately. For
example, Thomas Carothers, who was involved in what was called
the “democracy assistance project” during the Reagan
administration, has written a book and several articles about it.
He says the US seeks to create a form of top-down democracy
that leaves traditional structures of power—basically corporations
and their allies—in effective control. Any form of democracy that
leaves the traditional structures essentially unchallenged is
admissible. Any form that undermines their power is as intolerable
as ever.

So there’s a dictionary definition of democracy and then a real-world
definition.

The real-world definition is more or less the one Carothers
describes. The dictionary definition has lots of different dimensions,
but, roughly speaking, a society is democratic to the extent that
people in it have meaningful opportunities to take part in the
formation of public policy. There are a lot of different ways in
which that can be true, but insofar as it’s true, the society is
democratic.
A society can have the formal trappings of democracy and not be
democratic at all. The Soviet Union, for example, had elections.

The US obviously has a formal democracy with primaries, elections,
referenda, recalls, and so on. But what’s the content of this