To live and breathe in a democracy today is to believe that it is the best government system known to men. Democracy’s history has been traced all the way back to ancient Greece. Philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche saw it as a secularized version of the Christian doctrine of universal equality of human dignity, while others such as Alexis de Tocqueville as a providential fact.
Tocqueville, in his introduction to Democracy in America, regarded the modern democracy’s ideal of human equality to have been gaining ground for the preceding 800 years. Contemporary writers such as Samuel Huntington saw the globalization of democracy happening within the last two centuries in three primary sweeps. The first long wave began in 19th century Europe, the second wave in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and the third began in the 1970’s which started with Spain and Portugal, then the end of military rule in Greece and Turkey, followed by a series of Latin American and Asian countries. By the year 1999, Amartya Sen wrote in the Journal of Democracy: Democracy as a Universal Value that “while democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.”
Those of us living in a democracy may have a consensus view that arriving at a type of government institution is a choice, the way our founders designed American democracy. But in reality, arriving at a government institution depends on a country’s geolocation, its people, and unknowable happenstance, yet significant enough to change the course of its history forever. Among the most classic examples are China and India – one among the most prominent authoritarian regimes, and the other a very famous democracy.
It was relentless warfare that formed early China, leading to the consolidation of thousands of political units into a single state. The transition from a decentralized feudal state to a unified empire was accomplished entirely through conquest. In the 294-year duration of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, beginning in 771 BCE, more than 110 political units were extinguished through more than 1211 wars. In the following 254 years, 468 wars took place between the surviving warring states. China invented modern bureaucracy, that is, a permanent administrative cadre selected on the basis of ability rather than kinship or patrimonial connection. It emerged from the chaos of Zhou China, in response to the urgent necessity of extracting taxes to pay for war.
China’s subsequent state maturation serves as an example of a history of the state vs. the family system. Its history, up through Communist victory in 1949, is defined by the tensions between Legalism and Confucianism, revolving around the appropriate role of the family in politics. Dominating the Chinese family traditions and practices is the Confucius doctrine, an intensely backward looking doctrine that roots legitimacy in ancient practices of family and kinship. While Confucianism built a moral doctrine of the state based on the family model, later state men such as Shang Yang of Qin saw Confucianism as the source of enormous corruption and its glorification of the family as obstacles to the consolidation of political power. To counter the Confucian familistic society, they founded and implemented Legalism, embodying policies seeking to develop a strong state. Thus China’s great legacy is high-quality authoritarian government. It’s no accident that all successful authoritarian modernizers, including South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are East Asian countries sharing a common Chinese heritage. Authoritarian rulers with qualities like those of Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore or Park Chung Hee of South Korea do not exist elsewhere in the world.
Unlike China, the Indian states did not experience a 500-year period of warfare. Around the time that states were formed, a fourfold division of social classes emerged known as varnas: Brahmins – the priests, Kshatriyas – the warriors, Vaishyas – the merchants, and Sudras – everyone else. Being separated from the warrior class enabled the Brahmins to become guardians of the sacred law independent of political rule. The following emergence of castes, which subdivide all varnas into hundreds of occupational groups, formed the bedrock organization of Indian society. India’s subsequent state maturation serves as an example of a history of the state vs. the caste system.
In biology, path-dependent evolution is a concept where a lineage’s history irrevocably shapes its future evolutionary trajectory. Crucial junctures in a lineage act as one-way doors, opening up some possibilities while closing off others. The emergence of varna and jati that formed the backbone of Indian society acted as a crucial juncture that shaped the Indian government institution to the present day. While priesthood in China never went beyond ancestor worship, religion in India evolved into a sophisticated metaphysical system that explained all aspects of the phenomenal world, shifting from one of ancestral worship to a cosmological system encompassing the whole of nature. Access to this transcendent world was guarded by the Brahmins, placing them at the top of the hierarchy. Thus it was India’s institutionalization of countervailing social actors, along with its sophisticated development of religion, that hindered the accumulation of power by the state. While China was a unified empire punctuated by periods of civil war, invasion, and breakdown, India was shaped by disunified political units, punctuated by brief periods of unity and empire. The history of India before the late 20th century is one of persistent political disunity and weakness, with foreign invaders being the country’s most successful unifiers. India’s political and social history, then, set up the modern Indian democracy today, even though it meets none of the “structural” conditions for being a stable democracy.
Along with Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, in The Origins of Political Order, argues that societies need order before they need democracy, and that they were better off making an authoritarian transition to a fully modernized political and economic system rather than trying to jump directly to democracy. As demonstrated with China and India, institutions are shaped by historical legacies and external powers. The predisposition that a nation can simply change its government system is a myth. The most recent case study is that of the Middle East. In the early 2010’s, a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions, dubbed the “Arab Spring”, spread across much of the Arab world, igniting hope for many that they would become a democracy revolution. Instead, these conflicts transitioned into the “Arab Winter”, hammered by massive political instability and economic hardship, and civil wars in Syria, Libya, and in Yemen, still raging on.
There are recent examples of countries having the opportunity to set up their institutions from scratch. After WWII, Lee Kwan Yew, a young Cambridge-educated lawyer, became the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Singapore. His approach to government no doubt was influenced by both his Chinese heritage and Western education.
The second example is the United States of America, which gained independence from Great Britain in 1776. Influenced by the philosophy of the European Enlightenment Age and the very struggle for independence from Britain, early United States institutions amplified America’s anti-statist and a strong distrust of the government. The American founders attempted to invent a government machine that restrained itself, leaving the majority of American life free from government or politics. Its institutions include the check and balance of powers between the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary branches. In fact, the American founders, with the exception of Alexander Hamilton, aimed to minimize the power of the government. Thomas Jefferson, in his first Inaugural Address, said “we may well doubt whether our organization is too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.”
Within the last 250 years, American institutions have been expanding in order to adapt to social demand and economic changes. In his book, The Storm Before The Calm, George Friedman argues that because the United States is an invented country of immigrants that run on speedy changes and creativity that hinges on technology inventions, institution amendments happen remarkably fast in order to adapt. He theorizes that the U.S. goes through 50-year socioeconomic cycles and 80-year institutional cycles, which are extraordinarily short when compared to other nations. However, others hold different theories with regard to the US government transformation. Francis Fukuyama, in Political Order and Political Decay, views the U.S. institution transformation as an example of the evolution of a newly implanted democracy in a relatively underdeveloped country. He argues that the United States government building and expansion have been based on the need to improve accountability due to expansion and growing social complexity. He thus advocates to continue expansion of the government to further improve upon accountability, similar to a Western European government system. Beyond providing public necessities, the state ought to strive toward democracy’s original ideal, that is, the universal equality of human dignity.
Yet, would a thorough examination of democracy history align with its vision of equality? Walter Scheidel, author of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, argues that the only way to curb inequality is through catastrophes. “Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare (e.g. the U.S. Civil War), violent and transformative revolutions (e.g. the Communist Revolutions in China and Russia), state collapse (e.g. the collapse of the Roman Empire), and catastrophic epidemics (e.g. the Black Death in the late Middle Ages). Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk.” Even the most progressive welfare European states are now struggling to compensate for the widening income disparities. In the coming decades, the dramatic aging of rich countries, the pressures of immigration, and technological changes will make it ever harder to ensure a fairly equitable distribution of wealth.
And if democracy can’t solve inequality, what good does it do for its citizens? Perhaps to address this question, we ought to reexamine the formulation of a democracy. A liberal democracy consists of two components, liberal rule of law and mass political participation. The liberal rule of law encompasses the “government by gentlemen” of the American founders – the wealthy elites who were the merchant-bankers in New York and Boston and the planter aristocracy in Virginia. It was set out to provide legal protection for private property and individual rights.
The mass political participation encompasses the Jacksonian tradition of populism in American politics, which began with the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson first ran for president in 1824. He won both the popular and electoral college votes, but he was denied the presidency by the House of Representatives. The electoral college system had been designed by the founders precisely to permit greater elite control over the election of presidents. Riding a wave of populist anger and empowered by newly enfranchised voters, he defeated John Quincy Adams in 1828. In contrast to Adams, who traveled Europe, spoke several languages, and graduated Harvard, Jackson had a spotty formal education and made his reputation as a fighter and brawler. It was his non-elite background that won him the newly expanded electorate.
Reflecting upon what constitutes democracy and the political revolutions of the past, one would conclude the hallmark feature that a democratic form of government avails is the freedom of expression: a channel to vent anger through ways of speech and voting. Democracy is meant to ensure circulation of the elites. Out of this class of full-time pencil pushers, one may only hope that some are sufficiently competent to entertain the masses, and the rare few be good enough to influence the thought current of their times.
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