Chapter 1
In this chapter, we introduce democratic theory historically in order to stress the historicity and heterodoxy of democratic possibilities. Each of the brief vignettes on the historical development of democracy presented here seeks to contribute further to an understanding of how historical experiences of democracy that have come to form a tradition of Western democratic thought have come to significantly influence a twenty-first-century globalism dominated by doctrines of liberal individualism, the free market, and political minimalism. In particular, they seek to illustrate that intellectual contention and political volatility always surrounded democracy’s core principles, that attempts to universalize and essentialize these principles were always challenged, and that, therefore, tendencies toward democratic heterodoxy in an age of neoliberal global hegemony are best understood not as utopian or heretical but as part of an ongoing struggle for social and economic justice and meaningful political participation.
The first examines ancient Athenian democracy from the point of view of contemporary interpretations that seek to recapture its value for pluralizing contemporary democracy against the traditional opposition of modern and ancient, representative and direct democracy that has been taken for granted in dominant liberal-democratic understandings of democracy. The second examines popular sovereignty’s emergence in populist claims in the debates of the English Civil War, prior to its formation of modern democratic government in order to suggest that popular sovereignty is never fully assimilated to the form of the state. The next focuses on how liberal skepticism about popular sovereignty and “too much democracy” generated a new form of liberal democracy. Finally, we turn to the interpolation of neoliberal globalism into liberal democracy, which becomes the focus of the next chapter.
Vignette 1: Ancient or Classical Democracy: Athenian Experiences
The traditional narrative of modern democracy, from the eighteenth century on, has largely viewed classical Greek democracy as ill suited to the modern world. It has, consequently, showed little interest in seriously investigating how ancient democracy actually worked. Ancient or classical democracy is thus most often characterized as “direct” democracy and therefore as outmoded, suited only to small city-states. From this perspective, classical or direct democracy is characterized as governed not by reason but by demagoguery, as allowing “too much freedom” to those incapable of dealing with the responsibilities and complexities of life in a free society. Modern democracy, on the other hand, is of the representative kind, thus once removed from this demagoguery and irresponsibility and imbued with post-Enlightenment liberal sensitivities that guarantee the protection of individual rights and the rule of law. The founding fathers of the American Constitution shared this perspective to varying degrees,1 as did a major democratic theorist of the 1950s and 1960s, Robert Dahl, who proposed that the political ideas and institutions of Greek democracy, innovative and crucial as they were in their time, were (rightly) rejected during the development of modern representative democracy.2
Dahl’s conclusions on this issue are correct as far as they go. Mainstream liberal and conservative thinkers have largely rejected the classical Greek model in their considerations of what is possible and desirable in the contemporary world, invoking instead variations on the capitalist democracy model touched on above, which, since World War II in particular, has been largely articulated in American cultural, geopolitical, and economic terms. But more critically inclined thinkers have been skeptical about the reasoning behind the mainstream position, suggesting that while “direct” democracy of the classical kind might indeed be illogical in large, complex modern societies, this is not the major reason for the repudiation of the Greek democratic scenario. Rather, the repudiation of the Greek experience is less about any historical irrelevancy per se and more about a deeply embedded conservative fear of “too much democracy,” and an ongoing concern in the modern era about maintaining traditional order and control in a situation where the “mob” has political power.3 Accordingly, a range of critical scholars have refocused attention on the historical-political and intellectual context of the classical Greek era (sixth–fourth centuries BCE) in seeking broader insight into the current contestation about the nature, meaning, and future of democracy and democratic society.4
The best historical evidence we have is that Athenian democracy was born in the struggles of peasant farmers to escape “from any form of servitude or tribute to lord or state” in the sixth century BCE.5 The term itself combines demos (the people) with kratia (rule) as demokratia: “rule by the demos, the mass of ordinary adult male natives.”6 It seems to have arisen primarily as a derogatory term, used by the aristocracy as a term of contempt for the abilities of the “ordinary” people to rule themselves. The struggle for Athenian democracy nevertheless resulted in the “emancipation of the serfs” during Solon’s reforms in the 590s BCE, and the creation of a “Council of 400,” which afforded the small landowners and the thetes, the non-landowning foot soldiers, some influence over government decision making.7 The main governing council, the Areopagus, remained restricted to the richest (male) citizens, but Solon’s reforms helped to constitute the nascent Athenian demos, creating a sense of the people as a collective body whose allegiance was not just to kinship or religion but also to the constitution of the community as a collective political entity.
Moreover, Solon (638–558 BCE) created a criminal court, in which any ordinary citizen could seek justice against any other, regardless of class or kinship. The importance of this court cannot be overstated. As Ellen Wood puts it: “Crime was now defined as a wrong committed against a member of the civic community, not necessarily a kinsman; and the individual Athenian had the initiative as citizen, while the civic community, in the form of citizens’ courts, had jurisdiction.”8 The point is that these early concessions to the democratic sensibility created a sense among the lower orders in Athens that they were citizens, together with the wealthy, that in formal terms at least they were equals to those who had traditionally ruled them.
This gave added momentum to the struggles between the demos and the elites, which continued long after Solon’s initial reforms. Athenian politics, consequently, saw aspiring political rulers increasingly seeking the support of the “people” in order to consolidate their power base in society. One of these rulers, Cleisthenes, allied himself with the demos for this purpose and in so doing instituted constitutional reforms that strengthened the role of ordinary citizens, furthering their sense of themselves as a political entity and weakening the role of the traditional ruling caste. Cleisthenes’s most important reform was the division of the polis into “tribes,” based not on kinship or blood but on geography. These “tribal” areas were then subdivided into demes, essentially local districts in which citizens could meet and debate public matters.9 The demes then became the basis of elections to the “Council of 500,” the body that set the agenda for the ruling assembly, which met around forty times a year (as many as 6,000 citizens may have attended any particular session), while the council met almost daily. Cleisthenes also expanded the jurisdiction and importance of the “people’s court,” which would develop into the primary institution for checking the power of ambitious politicians (for example, through the practice of ostracism in which the fall from favor would be met with removal from office and exile) and into one of the most important democratic institutions of the fifth century BCE. Cleisthenes’s reforms are thus perceived as “the single most powerful push towards the concept of participation in the history of Athenian democracy.”10
For the next two centuries, this democratic structure and its participatory ethos was a significant feature of Athenian life, with only two brief oligarchic revolutions (in 411 and 404 BCE), both primarily reactions to defeats in the Peloponnesian Wars. Under Pericles (495–429 BCE, in power 461–429 BCE), power was shifted away from the more oligarchic Areopagus to a “Council of 500” and the court system, and the latter took on increased political functions. Moreover, Pericles initiated pay for the council and the juries, thereby making it possible for poorer citizens to participate. In this way, the jury courts became especially important in holding the political leaders and magistrates accountable to the demos.
In this broad context, the Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries also produced a remarkable body of philosophical and systematic reflection, including a number of literary genres engaging in the examination of politics and government.11 It saw, for example, the Sophists, a diverse group of teachers and philosophers, traveling from city to city teaching people how to think democratically, how to use rhetoric to make strong arguments for their views, and how to think about the crucial philosophical issues underpinning the great political issues of the day—in particular the question of law in a democratic society, for example: if a democracy has the power to make laws that people are obligated to obey, what does this mean for natural and religious law? Questioned too was the capacity of social and political beings to control their own fate in a democratic society, for example: what are the possibilities and limits of human agency? Raised also in distinctive ways were questions of ethics, of how one might live a virtuous, ethical life in a democratic society. Religion continued to occupy an important space in the Athenian democracy, but it no longer represented an unquestioned, unchallengeable ethics. Participation in political decision-making processes also now created ethical quandaries, obligations, and principles. In a democratic society, therefore, was “virtue” not something that could be understood in different ways, in ways no longer limited to the superior knowledge and reason of the elite?
Many of these questions continue to characterize the democratic debate in the contemporary era in one form or another, and an ethos of social and political equality continues to animate much democratic practice around the world in the twenty-first century. But as indicated above, from its Athenian beginnings, the theory and practice of democracy was an issue of fierce contestation. Pericles—whom Thucydides describes as the foremost and most powerful Athenian of the classical democratic era12—spoke in positive terms of its significance in creating both a moral and a political community concerned with democratizing public life. In his Funeral Oration, thus, he proposed:
We are the only people who regard a man who takes no interest in politics to be leading not a quiet life, but a useless one. We are also the only ones who either make governmental decisions or at least frame the issues correctly, because we do not think that action is hampered by public discourse, but by failure to learn enough in advance, through discourse, about what action we need to take.13
From this perspective the good democratic society is underscored by the practice of participatory politics and when ordinary citizens, not just the elite, take an active part in how society is governed. For Pericles, this also helped in the creation of a more educated and politically astute populace and a more inclusive and complete society in general. Aristotle (384–322 BCE), an admirer of Pericles, would echo this point and indicate further its broader social benefits when he argued, in the Politics, that the deliberation of everyday citizens was more likely to produce better decisions for society as a whole than a reliance on an elite, no matter how educated or knowledgeable (despite restrictions on citizenship to free adult males with the leisure to participate in deliberations, effectively ruling out not only women, slaves, and metics (resident aliens) but also much of the producing classes).14 On the other hand, Plato, regarded as the “father” of the conservative (and reactionary) perspective on the Western democratic narrative, responded to the democratic ethos and the prospects for political participation of the demos quite differently. In book 8 of his Republic, for example, he describes the Athenian democratic culture as one centered on a major misperception about both the nature and capacity of the demos, a misperception that led not to an enlightened citizenry and sound government but to destructive notions of equality and social freedom, the elevation of ignorant opinion over truth, and the tyranny of the uneducated mob.15
This ancient contestation goes on in regard to the meaning and implications of democratic ideas and practices, with many influential “democratic” thinkers continuing, to one degree or another, to maintain the skeptical Platonic view on the “democratic ethos” and the political rule of the majority. We touch on some elements of this thinking below (e.g., in Tocqueville). Suffice it for now to say that this brief sojourn into classical terrain is meant to indicate something of the historical and intellectual context within which the struggles for democracy began in the era of the Greek enlightenment. It is important to note also that, for the most part, this struggle was effectively lost for “democrats” for millennia, as modern Europe came to be through seemingly endemic conflicts involving feuding elites, territorial disputes, religious wars, and so forth. The notion of the “people” (as menacing mob or as vehicle of historical emancipation) remained visible through all of this,16 but it is not really until the early modern era (seventeenth century) that the democratic ethos and the agitation for political democracy again becomes a significant historical and intellectual factor.
Vignette 2: Democracy as a Modern Ethos of Popular Sovereignty
For really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.17
This was the view of Colonel Rainsborough, a spokesman for the Levellers, proclaiming the principle of popular sovereignty during the Putney Army Debates in 1647.18 The Levellers were a group of writers and political activists connected to Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army during the English Civil War. In addition to engaging in the Putney Debates (in which army officers debated the new constitution), they published and distributed numerous books and pamphlets, including the influential An Agreement of the People in 1647. The Leveller group was quite soon after stripped of its power and influence, but its significance in the present context is clear enough—as modern articulators of the democratic ethos and of the striving for a democratic political structure as the necessary foundation of the “good” society.
For Rainsborough, the good English society of the seventeenth century was one that included “the poorest he” and “the greatest he” as part of a single community and with all imbued with the right to consent to the government under which they lived. This was still by no means a comprehensive democratic appeal—there was no mention of the poorest “she”—but there is a sense here of the crucial part to be played in the good modern society by the “common people” as a political collectivity capable of, and deserving of, the rights and obligations of citizenship. For all this, Rainsborough, in seventeenth-century England, did not argue for either political or economic equality per se, but emphasized rather the need to respect the ordinary people as an integral part of the collective body politic—as the foundation of a “Commonwealth,” in Hobbes’s terms, that would come to inspire ways of thinking and behaving in society that might be fashioned into a democratic expression of popular sovereignty. In this sense, the perspectives of Rainsborough and the Levellers represent another historically specific and culturally infused articulation of the democratic ethos and its possibilities in a complex, volatile social setting.
Likewise, Montesquieu, writing in early and middle eighteenth-century France, defines democracy in terms of its principle—equality—and its spirit—civic virtue. In The Spirit of the Laws, consequently, Montesquieu stresses the significance of a “civic virtue” in the pursuit of a democratic society based on liberty, freedom, and equality. This is no easy task, he acknowledges, because it requires as its guiding principle the willingness to sacrifice individual self-interest for the collective interest of “the people” as a whole—an idea that was threatened in the eighteenth century by a thrusting bourgeois culture and an emergent liberal-capitalism that was for many Enlightenment thinkers the keystone of the democratic future.19 Realizing the call to civic virtue, the revolutionary events of 1789, and the aftermath, prompted both a more radically tinged invocation of the democratic ethos and a more profound sense of the problems it faced in modern political practice. For the more conservative Montesquieu, the best that one could hope for in this modern context was a freely elected liberal republic, founded upon a binding constitution that ensured a separation and balancing of administrative powers (between the executive, the legislative, and the judicial) in order that the influence of any one power or class or set of interests could not exceed that of the others.20
A century later, another French aristocrat with democratic sympathies, Alexis de Tocqueville, thought he had seen the ultimate model of a republican democracy in action in the United States, where, he believed, an individualist ethos and a democratic ethos were indeed being successfully fused in a “new world” context beyond the class stratification and feudal mind-sets of the European ancien régime. The United States became, for Tocqueville, the new symbolic reference point for the democratic imaginary. Citizens in America manifested a democratic spirit within them, he wrote, while praising their passionate belief in both individual liberty and social equality as intrinsic to their great republican adventure. But he, like Montesquieu, maintains that the very characteristics that gave such substance and strength to the U.S. republic could also undermine and destroy it without powerful and respected institutions to ensure “civic virtue.”
The problem with the democratic ethos of social equality and the “sovereignty of the people,” he proposes, echoing Greek skeptics from the ancient era, is that it leads to the notion that the “people” must rule, and, therefore, any dissent to the rule of the majority must be suppressed—to maintain “democratic” order. The solution for Tocqueville, as for Montesquieu, lay in cultivating civic virtue, which he considered difficult to cultivate among the lower classes, and therefore, he argues that “universal suffrage is by no means a guarantee of the wisdom of the popular choice.”21 The best solution was visible in New England, “where education and liberty are the daughters of morality and religion, where society has acquired age and stability enough to enable it to form principle and hold fixed habits,” and therefore, “the common people are accustomed to respect intellectual and moral superiority and to submit to it without complaint.”22 Otherwise, governmental institutions need to be balanced and calibrated to ensure rule by the indirectly elected Senate, of “eloquent” and “distinguished” men as an important counterweight to the “vulgarity” of the directly elected House of Representatives. This kind of social and class balance, he maintains, is important more generally in reducing the risk of the “tyranny of the majority” in modern societies and of the American republic “perishing miserably among the shoals of democracy.”23
Marx, of course, took a more radical approach to all of this in the nineteenth century and, amid the social misery of the industrial revolution in Europe, had little time for the views of French aristocrats on what the good democratic society should be like. Nor was Marx persuaded by the argument that the millennia-old struggles for liberty, freedom, and equality depended upon a system of checks and balances in either liberal republican or parliamentary systems. Indeed, for Marx, these systems, and these institutions, actively worked to enhance class privilege and an ethos of market exploitation and, as such, sought to undermine democracy rather than to protect it. In Marx’s early critiques of German liberalism, for example, he castigates liberal parliamentary reformers who sought democratic political emancipation on the basis of free parliamentary elections.24 A genuine “sovereignty of the people,” he contends, can only be achieved when notions of “civic virtue” are infused with class consciousness, when there is radical social restructuring, and when the economic means of production are in the hands of the working class. And Marx had more faith in the democratic commitments of the (class-conscious) majority, following its defeat of the liberal-capitalist system, to resist any descent into tyranny under the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
There is a good deal of ambiguity in Marx’s writings on this post-revolutionary phase, but given the dialectical framing of his thinking in general, the move to proletarian democracy is perhaps best understood as a first step in an enhanced intellectual and political trajectory for humankind—from the basic struggles of the masses for democratic freedom to increasingly higher forms of communal solidarity—in which social and productive relations would be increasingly infused with a democratic ethos. For some, of course, this is simply utopian speculation, for others, including some of those touched on above—the Zapatistas in the mountains of Chiapas, the peasants and workers in the Basque collectives, and the millions of poor barrio and favela dwellers throughout the pink-tide states of Latin America—it provides a democratic imagery of aspiration and opportunity and collective triumph over great odds and, in particular, over the perceived “false democracy” of the neoliberal world order.
Vignette 3: The Accommodation of Democracy and Liberalism
As indicated above, the liberals and republicans who came to power through the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries viewed democratic agitation based on popular sovereignty with skepticism and concern. They endorsed the principle that all legitimate political authority derived from the consent of the governed but were loath to endorse fully the proposition that “the people” therefore had a right to govern per se. Instead, liberals accepted the reality of modern democratic politics but only if their interests were protected by republican constitutions of the kind envisaged by Montesquieu and Tocqueville. In fact, most of the thinkers whom we now think of as constructing the modern tradition of American democracy felt this way. James Madison, for example, was concerned that direct political participation by the people would threaten the principles of private property and would lead to intolerance of minority opinions. Thus, half a century before Tocqueville’s conclusions on the issue, Madison was echoing Plato’s misgivings about the rule of the majority, proposing in Federalist no. 63 (1788) that the indirectly elected Senate was “necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions” and acted as “a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions.”25 More immediately, Madison and other U.S. “founding fathers,” such as Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, were following the intellectual lead of John Locke, in particular, who in his influential writings on the new liberal world of the seventeenth century had endorsed an indirect representative form of democratic legislature that above all protected private property.26
This was a theme that was even more evident by the nineteenth century as liberal-capitalist societies sought to pay due respect to the principle of popular sovereignty while diluting the passions and energies of the masses that Marx and other radicals sought to capture for revolutionary purposes. Here the notion of “representative democracy” had both structural and ideological significance, in splitting up the “mob” into geographical (electoral) districts and in placing greater emphasis on the role of political parties as the primary conduits through which their interests and desires might be coherently channeled into government. But liberal government could not contain the energies and passions of popular sovereignty so easily. Most obviously, while democracy implied equality, capitalism required inequality, and increasingly, as the promise of “trickle down” proved illusory for the great majority of people, the demands for equal rights and more equality in the distribution of wealth also increased. Nor was it as easy to resort to the notion of “the rule of the law” as an objective foundation for ameliorating this democratic surge or, indeed, to the “neutral” or “balancing” institutions of the state. For homo economicus (capitalism’s “economic man”), the law was understood as a bulwark against threats to private property and a protector of liberal civil society within which market relations and the pursuit of individual self-interest could be legitimately carried out. For some of those reimagining themselves in democratic terms, however, the law was simply an ideological mechanism by which the capitalist state ensured minority privilege and free-market exploitation. For many others, less radically inclined, the law acted as Solon and Cleisthenes intended it should, as the institution that most obviously manifested the ethos of democracy—ensuring that, all other evidence to the contrary, “Jack (or even Jill) was as good as his master.”
Either way, liberal capitalist governments were forced to respond to the demands and expectations of the poor and the working classes as they became increasingly imbued with the democratic ethos. And, much to the chagrin of Marxists, in particular, liberal capitalism adapted, to become a more inclusive form of “social democracy,” which saw “mixed economy” systems emerge to (partially) regulate the capitalist market while introducing progressive social policies and welfare programs to ameliorate its worst excesses. This proved to be a highly successful strategy in staving off the ideological extremes of left and right, and after World War II in the United States, the UK, and parts of Western Europe, variations on Keynesian social democracy were instituted as a means of simultaneously accommodating the desires for democratic collectivity and free-market individualism. It was this Keynesian compromise that effectively defined the social democratic world order until the mid-1970s, when, confronted by the twin specters of stagflation at home and a multitude of problems globally (e.g., Vietnam and OPEC), there was a powerful and ultimately successful challenge to the social democratic compromise in the major Western states—from neoliberalism—and an agitation for a return to a minimalist “market democracy.”
As indicated at the beginning of the chapter, neoliberalism views democracy and the democratic ethos as dependent upon market principles and an individualist, entrepreneurial attitude to the complex issues of modern society and politics. This perspective has become evident, too, as neoliberalism has become a major influence on the theory and practice of the global political economy since the 1990s and increasingly since the end of the Cold War.
Globalism and “Neoliberal Democracy”
In the wake of the Cold War, neoliberals invoked democracy as the keystone of the triumph of modernity, capitalist economics, and Western political culture—associating democracy with a mode of thinking and behavior in which a free-trade value system provides the necessary conditions for individual and social freedom. In more philosophical terms, neoliberal democracy seeks to save the modern world from the disasters that befell it at the end of the Keynesian era (too much: public spending, welfare, state involvement in the economy) by formalizing and attenuating it, that is, by stripping it back to individualist “economistic” foundations. The core values of democracy, thus, liberty, freedom, and equality, can, in neoliberal terms, be best realized in (neoclassical) economic terms, in the realm of private choices, freely and rationally made. Consequently, democracy becomes synonymous with capitalism and free-market principles and collectivist approaches with antidemocratic “tyranny” (the USSR) at worst and “failed” (Keynesian/socialist) societies at best.
We discuss this issue in more detail in chapter 2. For now, the metaphorical flourishes of Michael Mandelbaum indicate the nature of the neoliberal imagination when it comes to democracy in the current era. Thus, in Mandelbaum’s terms, the people of the world have chosen the free market and Western-style democracy since the end of the Cold War because they believe that “the market is to democracy something like what a grain of sand is to the pearl that an oyster contains: the core around which it forms.”27 More prosaically, capitalism and democracy go together because “the effective workings of free markets produces wealth, and wealth supports the two principal features of democracy: liberty and representative government.”28
At the core of this image of “representative democracy” is the election process, the crucial legitimating agency of neoliberal democracy because it gives the ordinary people what they want—the opportunity, at regular intervals, to participate in the modern political process in the way that modern democratic theory insists upon. More precisely, from a neoliberal perspective the electoral process—minimally understood—is all the modern demos wants from its representative system. Or, as Mandelbaum puts it, “representative democracy avoids, for most citizens, the problem that Oscar Wilde identified with socialism—that it takes too many evenings.”29 This presumption, about the political passivity of the contemporary masses, is not derived from the “false consciousness” notions associated with Marxism nor the more sophisticated hegemonic theme of Gramsci. Instead, from the perspective of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, the modern aspirational voter is naturally less interested in “political” participation, per se, than in “economic” activity, in the pursuit of a materialist self-interest that satisfies a more immediate and more profound rationality in the ongoing pursuit of security and prosperity. What is “irrational” from this point of view are the attempts by people seeking to overturn this natural order by radically changing the political system that affords so many people the opportunity to engage successfully with the free market. On this basis, a naturally functioning democracy has a particular meaning for neoliberals, and not surprisingly, it is a minimalist meaning. More precisely, neoliberalism favors a “polyarchic form of democracy”—a minimalist form that effectively allows a small political elite and powerful corporate sectors to rule, while emphasizing the electoral process and the competition between (liberal capitalist) political parties as integral to the “sovereignty of the people” theme. We explore this process and its ideological legitimation a little further in chapter 2, in relation to twenty-first-century American society in particular but also in terms of the globalizing of the polyarchy model in U.S. foreign policy (e.g., in Iraq) and in neoliberal globalization per se.
In this regard, the long-standing concern about the “irrationality” of more emancipatory forms of democracy is readily apparent, as indeed they have been in Western engagements with the global periphery for decades. It was integral, for example, to the findings of the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s, which concluded that the end result of “radical” democratic thinking, and the misplaced desire for rule by “the people,” had seen modern societies faltering under an “overload of democracy,” which effectively destroyed economies and created political expectations that could not be fulfilled—thus leading to social dislocation and governmental crisis. This was a particularly acute problem in the Third World, it was argued, where “socialist” influences were stirring up radical democratic expectations and anti-Western sentiments. If order was to be restored in such circumstances, insist Samuel Huntington and his Trilateralist colleagues, the tendency toward “too much democracy” needed to be thwarted and elite rule restored. This would then improve the conditions by which capitalist markets might operate unhindered and respect might be increased for Western (particularly U.S.) power and global leadership.
The work of Huntington and the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s is important in the present context, as a thematic bridge between the dominant Cold War meaning of democracy in the West and the post–Cold War neoliberal representation of it. It actually is of enhanced significance because it is located also at the intersection between neoliberalism and the neoconservatism that was to become so crucial to the U.S. global “democracy promotion” strategy during the Reagan era (1981–1989) and, most explicitly, during the presidency of George W. Bush (2000–2008). The neoconservative critiques of democracy, particularly U.S. democracy, were already evident in the early 1970s as part of an ongoing confrontation with the counterculture movement, those protesting the Vietnam War and the “new left” in general.30 The neoconservative position, simply put, was that throughout Western societies the generation of the 1960s, prompted by the delusions of grandeur associated with democratic notions of social and political equality and the “people’s” right to rule, had descended into a hedonistic, disrespectful “mob” that was now threatening traditional (elite) rule, American and Western culture, and the systemic dominance of Western power and status in the world.
Integral to this critique was the view that capitalism, as a core Western and democratic value, was crucial to the resuscitation of the good modern society, that while its “autonomous individual” theme could, as Tocqueville and others noted, threaten “civic virtue,” its entrepreneurial discipline and aspirational philosophy were important in channeling mass behavior away from political radicalism.31 This is a theme that has remained intrinsic to the globalizing of neoliberalism (and a less influential neoconservatism) in the current era, as advocates of neoliberal globalization have reworked the neoclassical imagery of the good “economic” society popularized by Milton Friedman and others and the “triumphalism” of post–Cold War neoconservatives such as Fukuyama. This has been the case most notably in the support given to regimes around the world that have embraced the neoliberal free-market doctrine while retaining political control in (often brutal) minority hands in variations on the polyarchy theme (e.g., China, post-Soviet Russia, Saudi Arabia). On the other hand, there has been condemnation and relentless intervention in the affairs of societies that have sought to break down elite rule and replace it with a form of democracy that takes the “sovereignty of the people” notion more seriously (e.g., Venezuela, the pink tide generally).
In the introduction, we touched on some of the negative reactions around the world to this kind of discrepancy in neoliberal democracy. At the core of the neoliberal world order, for example, in the United States and the UK, there has been disquiet by a whole spectrum of people concerned by another discrepancy—between the extraordinary wealth and increasing privilege of minorities favored by a free-market environment—and the fate of great majorities structurally and ideologically abandoned by the neoliberal system. In the midst of the resultant social dislocation, serious questions are again being asked about what democracy means in such a situation. The protests of the Occupy movements with their representation of a society split between the rich “1 percent” and the struggling “99 percent” pose this question in simple but profound terms, as do the many challenges to the neoliberal model of democracy from areas far beyond the core neoliberal states. In Latin America, the meaning of democracy has been a question of particular significance in the continent-wide rejection of the neoliberal invocation of it. Consequently, different kinds of democratic imagery have been invoked from that to be found in the neoliberal “economistic” variant, and different kinds of democratic ethos (radical, collectivist, indigenous, etc.) have been expressed in the ongoing contestation with neoliberal globalization. In chapter 3, the “Bolivarian” ethos integral to Venezuela’s contestation over the real meaning of democracy will receive detailed examination. In chapter 4, we examine three more situations—in post-apartheid South Africa, in the “shining” India of the post-1990s period, and in post-Soviet Russia under Yeltsin and Putin—as further examples of the struggles over democracy in the neoliberal era. In the chapter now to follow, however, we turn in much more detail to the theory and practice of neoliberal democracy in order to explain more precisely what it stands for, what some of its implications are in practice.