Distinguished commentators from The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman to the editors of The Economist warn that diverse Western democratic governments–like those in California, the U.S. and Europe–are too hamstrung by interest groups and partisan politics to make the necessary decisions. They urge the world to look to fast-moving Asian governments, especially those of Singapore and China, as models of governance. But those are highly authoritarian regimes with records of abusing human rights. In advance of Zócalo’s first Sacramento event, “Is Democracy Too Slow?” we ask what democracies can learn from the authoritarians.
The virtues of technocrats
Our societies could benefit from a greater balance between the democratic emphasis on “inputs” and the growing demand for more measurable “outputs.” We cannot be afraid of technocracy (expert-led public sector management not subject to constant special interest politics) when the alternative is the futile populism of Argentines, Hungarians and Thais masquerading as democracy. It is precisely these non-functional democracies that are prime candidates to be superseded by better-designed technocracies–likely delivering more benefits to their citizens.
To the extent that China and Singapore provide guidance for governance that Western democracies don’t, it is in having “technocrats with term limits.” Chinese and Singaporean leaders see their legitimacy as deriving from the delivery of welfare and benefits to their people, granting them economic and increasingly social freedom, and limited but growing amounts of political freedom. For a state as large and populous as China, it is unfair to prescribe a Western democratic model. Indeed, it is not only China’s leaders who prefer evolution to revolution, but also the rest of the world, whose economic growth is intimately bound up with China’s stability.
Parag Khanna is a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the forthcoming book Hybrid Reality: From the Information Age to the Singularity (TED Books, June 2012).
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The benefits of politics and institutions that focus on the long-term
In the United States today, we no longer live in what common coinage refers to as an “industrial democracy,” no less the agriculture-based landed aristocracy in which the American constitutional system was originally conceived–and from which it has scarcely evolved despite Thomas Jefferson’s well-known view that constitutions normally run their course within about 20 years. He felt the living, not the dead, should make the rules by which they are governed.
Today’s America is far from the insulated homogeneity and small scale of traditional societies with their earthy virtues of place, or even from the time when capital and labor confronted each other across the barricades or through disciplined mass parties. Today’s America is a highly diverse, culturally hybrid, urbanized, densely networked “consumer democracy” that is predominantly middle-class. The United States has become a largely service and information economy where consumer purchases account for 70 percent of Gross Domestic Product.
Above all, the practice of one-person, one-vote electoral democracy has not come to grips with the long-term consequences of its post-World War II marriage to the ideology of consumerism.
Democratic systems are designed to give the majority what they want when they want it. Americans want their liberty and their right to the pursuit of happiness, defined in our time as consumer plenitude. And they want it now.
By nature, consumer choice is short-term and self-interested. Particularly after winning the Cold War against a Soviet regime that sacrificed the present well-being of its people for the “pink clouds of utopia,” in poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s11 phrase, the triumphant culture of the American superpower willfully forgot how to remember the future. It was confident that electoral democracy and free choice in the marketplace would guide society to the right place in history.
While no one would diminish the very considerable comforts and conveniences of consumerism, a guiding societal ethos of short-term self-interest inevitably tends to eclipse any perspective of the long-term and common good. All the feedback signals in a consumer democracy–politics, the media and the market–steer behavior toward immediate gratification.
In this Diet Coke culture, all too many people–as revealed, for example, by the sub-prime mortgage bubble–have come to expect consumption without savings or education, and infrastructure and social security without taxes, just as they expect sweetness without calories in a soft drink. It is easy to see from this dynamic how the “retail rationality” of self-interest can add up to the “wholesale madness” of exuberant bubbles, mountains of debt and fiscal crisis.
What America can learn above all from places like China and Singapore (despite their considerable faults that range from massive corruption in China to a Singapore meritocracy that has become a bit too paternalistic) is that we need political institutions that embody the perspective of the long-term and common good to balance out the short-term special interest political culture that dominates governance today. Though they must be accountable, such institutions must be “disinterested” and above the political fray, insulated from the direct pressures of electoral politics.
Nathan Gardels is editor of the New Perspectives Quarterly.
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The virtues of slavery?
Do democratic governments have something to learn from authoritarian Singapore and China? Zócalo’s website makes clear that the premise of this audacious question is that authoritarianism offers the benefits of efficiency in a fast-paced world while democracy drags and lags. What could be worse than being bogged down with things like voting, debate, disagreement, and input from the people or their representatives? Fascists have always understood and embraced the tough choices inherent in this trade-off, whereas democrats never really confront the downside of democracy or fully grasp the upside of toning it down.
And so, Zócalo deserves a crisp military salute for asking us to consider the vital lessons authoritarian governments can teach democracies. But isn’t the question too timid? If we want maximum efficiency, we really need to take the next step and revisit the merits of slavery. I don’t mean the latifundia slavery of Rome or plantation slavery from American history. That’s so 1st and 19th century. We need slavery updated by the power and choices of the Internet. In other words, modern slaves with appropriately censored Twitter and Facebook access.
Although it is probably too much to hope for, the ideal combination would really be slavery under a no-nonsense dictatorship. A well-run dictatorship delivers important benefits like fast and smart decisions on long-term fiscal matters, which please business immensely and spur investment. Say goodbye to democratic gridlock and hello to balanced budgets, productivity, and profits.
Meanwhile, an obvious benefit of slavery is that it instantly delivers full employment. Job security! And because slaves are valuable business assets, investors are incentivized to keep their human investments in top condition. This goes a long way toward solving the housing and healthcare problems that can plague democracies, and without all the red tape and regulation that invariably mucks things up.
Places like China and Singapore provide only a hint of what’s possible when it comes to governments that are smart, agile, and efficient. The fact that some freedom-loving Chinese students must occasionally be slaughtered, or that wealthier, educated Singaporeans continue to leave in droves for democracies, suggests that some confusion remains about the benefits of authoritarianism. This matter can be settled once the world’s democracies see the light and not only become more authoritarian, but unleash the synergies of combining dictatorship with 21st-century slavery. So, the answer is an emphatic yes–Singapore and China can teach democracies about the high art of trampling on the most fundamental human freedoms in the name of technocratic efficiency.
Jeffrey A. Winters is a professor of political economy at Northwestern University.
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Not much
For the past several years, I have traveled to a string of modern authoritarian regimes to study how they govern. It was a long list, and it included countries as varied as China, Egypt, Malaysia, Qatar, Russia, Singapore, and Venezuela. Some were rich, some poor. Some were straining under mounting political, economic, and social pressures. Others were remarkably stable, and may be enjoying a renaissance of sorts. None of them deserved our envy.
The reason is that the undemocratic roots of these political systems leave them exposed. When the troubles come–and they always do–the conversation can quickly turn to the legitimacy of the ruling party. In places like China and Singapore, some problems can be solved with the right technocratic fix. But there will come a time when it is more important to be legitimate than right.
But that doesn’t mean that these countries can’t teach us anything. After all, there is something to the democratic critique you hear these days, especially in capitals such as Beijing, Hanoi, and Singapore. There officials and academics will point out the high levels of voter apathy in democracies as well as the intense political partisanship that freezes the gears of governments in the United States, Europe, India, and Japan. The fact that a relatively small populist movement like the Tea Party can tie up the U.S. political agenda is both bizarre and alarming. The political deadlock that led to the Standard & Poor’s rating agency downgrading U.S. creditworthiness last summer was utterly mind-boggling.
One of the strengths of a Leninist system is its ability to direct massive amounts of resources at a specific target. It doesn’t matter if the target is economic growth, disaster relief, a dissident political movement, or even environmental policy. For good or ill, the system can mobilize around a goal, marshal its manpower, and move swiftly. Even George Soros admits that China has a “better functioning government than the United States.” When I asked Pan Wei, a prominent conservative scholar at Beijing University about the virtues of democracy versus a modern authoritarian system, he argued that election cycles of two or four years were just too slow to be of much good. “China moves faster than that,” he said.
Maybe. But a government can only separate how it functions from how it chooses its leaders for so long. At some point, those two truths must be reconciled. And when they are, change will come–fast.
William J. Dobson is the politics and foreign affairs editor at Slate. He is the author of The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy.
*Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of State.