Evil Empire 85democracy—with its subordination of such substantive matters
as equality, freedom, and general welfare to procedural issues, its
obsession with the holding of elections and the preservation of
norms—has turned out to be the best way of concentrating and
deepening oligarchic power. This is the main reason it has provoked
such furiously emphatic rejections worldwide from voters who feel
utterly deceived and powerless, who no longer believe that liberal
democracy is superior to authoritarian rule.
Still, the answer is not less democracy, or authoritarian populism.
We need more democracy in India and elsewhere—substantive democ-
racy. It is a truism that democracy in its Western habitat struggled for
a long time to concede equal rights to slaves, women, workers, and the
colonized on the grounds that they were deficient in reason. The project
of equality and freedom was also continuously undermined by the rise
of a market economy and a bureaucratic state, which placed economic
and political rationality above moral claims. In many ways democracy in
its ideal form has been more clearly formulated in postcolonial nations,
where it was attached from the very beginning to promises of equality,
social and economic justice, and the welfare of the poor and underpriv-
ileged castes. We need to rebuild and reinstitutionalize this vision. We
say we believe in democracy. But the urgent question, wherever we are,
is what kind of democracy. One where wage slavery is the norm? Where
politicians deploy the ample tools of demagoguery to get elected and
then ignore ordinary voters? Or, instead, one in which power is not
concentrated at the top and people feel themselves to be citizens as well
as voters, able to participate in making decisions that affect their lives?
The latter is obviously preferable, but it will be difficult to work our way
to it. Political elites have used elections and parliaments as instruments
of legitimacy; they exercise monopoly power in the media as well, and
they will not give it up easily.