On the Tensions between Liberalism and Democracy (Shadi Hamid at Persuasion)
I saw echoes of how people talked about Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in how people talked about Trump and the deplorables. You have liberal and secular elites who are better educated. They think they know what’s best for everyone…people start backfilling a lot of liberal progressive ideas, and that happens a lot when we talk to folks abroad. We start to include things about gender equality…
If well-being is just the satisfaction of informed preferences then it is precisely liberalism that promotes well-being—by undermining the constraints imposed by ‘traditional societies’ where the lives people live are determined by unchosen characteristics: sex, race, clan, and the like. Democracy is good because, and only to the extent that, it promotes liberalism.
Populations of traditional societies, including the white working class in the US, support illiberal regimes. Lower class voters and citizens of non-Western countries vote for populists because they resent ‘liberal and secular elites’ and, most importantly, because given their immediate circumstances, liberal policies will not benefit them.
Gender equality may benefit a few women in Afghanistan, the educated, urban women whose stories we read, but will not improve the lives of most Afghan women. In the US, gender equality in the form promoted by elites, serves the interests of elite women who compete in a unisex job market, but does not benefit working-class women who want to opt out of a labor force where their only job prospects are boring, low-wage, dead-end pink-collar jobs.
In the long run however accommodating members of traditional societies in the US and abroad locks in systems that are not optimal. Currently, most Afghan women benefit from the establishment of Taliban rule, which has ended ongoing warfare and suppressed violence but which makes change for the better impossible. In the US, the sex-segregated system the working class want, in which men would be paid a ‘family wage’ adequate to support wives and children, would enable women to exit the labor force. But, while career housewifing at the cost of economic dependence and subservience, is better than caring, cashiering, cleaning, catering, or clerical work, it would be better still if women had more job options.
In a democracy, self-interested choosers vote for relatively safe little wins rather than risking big losses in hopes of getting big wins against the odds. Working class Americans can vote for an illiberal system in which, they believe, strong religion, extensive policing, and harsh punishments will keep them safe, at the cost of restrictions on their freedom. Or they can vote for a less restrictive liberal regime risking (as they see it) street crime and terrorism, and danger to them, their families, and their property. In a democratic system, where the lower classes have political power, they will vote in illiberal regimes run by Big Men whom, they believe, will protect and provide for them.
Is democracy worth it? It is an empirical question whether democratic regimes will provide safety and material well-being—people’s most basic needs. The Chinese communist government has struck a bargain with its constituency: accept authoritarian rule, surveillance, and restrictions on your freedom and we will guarantee stability and prosperity. If there were no other way to get those goods, the Chinese system would be worth it.
But it is not they only way. European social democracies have managed to provide stability and prosperity for their citizens without that cost. Nevertheless, the lower classes in the US and abroad do not believe that they can be financially secure or safe without accepting the restrictions imposed by an illiberal regime—whether an autocratic communist system or a theocratic strong-man regime. They do not believe that they can risk liberalism.
Prompted by demagogues, the white working class in the US believe that American cities are hellscapes dominated by violent street gangs, that caravans of drug-dealers and rapists are pouring across the border, that their children are being ‘groomed’ by pedophiles, and that the Left promote open borders and the defunding of the police in order to get the votes of criminals, drug-dealers, and pedophiles.
Under the current democratic system the working class have political power which they use it to undermine the liberal agenda and to ‘own the libs’, whom they envy and resent. Democracy, which enfranchises and empowers them, represents a real and present danger to the liberal order.
Democracy and liberalism are compatible. They have, for generations coexisted in Western Europe and the Anglosphere. But they are not necessarily coextensive and arguably if we must choose we should choose liberalism.