Future Of Freedom [Hardcover]

 

 

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Fareed Zakaria is an intellectual whose time has come. Handsome, foreign-born, a possible candidate for the first Muslim Secretary of State, he has the sort of cachet the mass media love. His only problem is that he is a shallow conventional thinker with nothing intelligent to say. But that isn't really a problem for American journalism. The United States is a country where you can say anything you want. But being listened to, if you are to the left of Michael Kinsley or Robert Kerry, is another thing entirely. In the absence of real debate we have pseudo-debate and here Zakaria can shine. His thesis is that we are threatened with too much democracy. Rich and wealthy businessmen do not have sufficient power to insulate themselves and the world economic system from democratic pressure. It's an appalling injustice. Zakaria does not put his argument quite like that. Instead he argues that while Americans naturally wish to encourage free elections in the world, those free elections have the unfortunate habit of electing people like Yeltsin, Putin and Chavez. They would probably elect all sorts of nasty fundamentalists in the Middle East if those countries deigned to have elections. What these countries need is not more democracy, but more liberal constitutionalism. This means not merely the rule of law and an independent judiciary, but also vigorous action to encourage the free market economy and open investment. At the same time American democracy has weakened liberty by unwise congressional reform leading to lobbyists while plebiscites and initiatives have paralysed local government.

It is nice to have Zakaria admit, after decades of Republican cant against elites, that it is really conservative economists who would like to form an elite protected from public scrutiny and debate. But otherwise this is a shallow book. For a start, Zakaria is a remarkably sloppy writer. Thessalonica is a city, not a tribe, and the vicious massacre that he cites occurred there, not in Milan. The National Assembly is confused with the Revolutionary Convention. The final deal between Clinton and Arafat is dated well into Bush's presidency, while the last Mexican presidential election is placed in the wrong year. Disraeli's support for the Second Reform Act is placed in 1882, after he had already died. "The masses, Bismarck believed, would always vote for the pro-monarchial conservatives. He was right." No, he was wrong: soon majorities voted for Socialists, Catholics and Liberals. Zakaria has Saddam Hussein using biological weapons against his own citizens, when he clearly means chemical weapons. At other times Zakaria is simply tendentious. In trying to present a relatively favourable picture of Islam as a whole, he notes that the four largest Islamic countries, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, have all elected female presidents or prime ministers. He neglects to add that they were all elected because they were the closest relatives of leading male statesman. Much of his discussion of the origins of democracy is conventional guff about the rise of the Catholic Church, the Reformation, the success of Britain, while the Third French Republic gets only a sentence.

More serious are the limitations of Zakaria's picture. He notes how successful liberal democracy has been after military pro-market dictators in Chile, South Korea and Taiwan. He forgets that Chile was a successful liberal democracy for decades before Pinochet overthrew it in 1973, and that Sri Lanka has, despite a brutal civil war, been both more democratic and more liberal than South Korea. Certainly the Germany of Bismarck, von Bulow and Bethmann-Hollweg was more liberal, more democratic and arguably even more capitalist than the South Korea of Colonel Park. He credits South Korea's progress to its attachment to the market and ignores the special hothouse conditions of the cold war that encouraged its rise (Japanese investment diverted there from a blockaded China, more American aid than given to all of Africa for a start. He never asks what the "liberal" consensus of "The New Republic" and "The National Review" has done to deserve Arab support, or, after their support of Yeltsin, Russian support. Often Zakaria pines for a prosperous middle class, which will bring democracy. Yes, I remember how we were all inspired in 1980 when the Communist regime in Poland was brought to its knees by the strike of Gdansk shipyard's middle management. Likewise, COSATU did far more to encourage South African democracy than Paton or Oppenheimer, and one can make the same statement for South Korea, Brazil and much of the rest of the world.

Zakaria blames many of the United States' current problems on excessive democracy. He blames primaries for destroying the old party elites, but that did not stop them from ensuring the nomination of Bush I, Clinton, Dole, Gore and Bush II. He ignores the fact that many of the "democratic" reforms he blames are actually "liberal" ones, such as The Independent Counsel Act and initiatives against raising taxes (a model Hayekian measure). Zakaria comments about media vulgarity, but he ignores signs of media concentration and the oligarchic Telecommunications Act. He blames California's problems on excessively democratic machinery, and not on a ruthless well-organized elite that benefits from an electorate skewed against California's large Hispanic minority. One would better off reading Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" and "Dead Cities." Likewise one would be better off reading Lizabeth Cohen on credit cards and Deborah Rhode's "In the Interests of Justice," rather than blaming "democracy" for the fall of legal integrity. His vision of democracy says nothing about free trade unions, gender equality, social welfare or diversity of public opinion. And while he might want Alan Greenspan to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board For Life, what do the rest of us do if the economy should ever sink? At the end he twists Woodrow Wilson's famous statement of "making democracy safe for the world." Or for capitalism. Or for the Republican Party. Whichever is easier, and more profitable.

This book is a recipe for fascism: the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary components of finance capital. In case anyone hasn't noticed: we voters here in the US have had our "choice" of 2 corporate candidates for each important position for many many years. A choice of 2 corporate candidates is not an election or democracy: it is an exercise in futility and a disquised dictatorship. Looking at the results of corporate owned government and censored corporate owned media and corporate war machine that the US people have been yoked with for 70 years ...this author declares "this democracy" doesn't work. It would be more accurate to say that the corporate dictatorship hasn't worked. Do you really think that if this were a democracy that we would have so many with no health care, high pollution, decaying infrastructure, highest poverty, corporate media cartel propaganda outlets instead of a free media, and infant mortality rates of any other major industrialized nation to name a few results of the autocracy?
Finally, The US and European oligarchs installed and funded the European fascists and Nazis to prevent a worker's revolution in Europea and to attempt to overthrow the SOviet Union. The Nazis were not elected. They only got 1/3rd of the vote in 1933 even though they had shut down the presses of the other parties and had corporate funded goon squads in the streets. They had the corresponding # of seats in the Reichstag...only 1/3rd. (Some Background= Real History: 55 million members of the "left" were murdered in the WWII holocaust. The Jews were used as a demagogic scapegoat for the people's hatred of the capitalist looting system but were not a target at the upper echelons. The US&UK only showed up in Europe in 1944 after Russia had won the war to prevent them from liberating more of Europe. The US reinstalled the fascists and Nazis where possible and brought many others into the US military. Since WWII the US has installed fascist oligarchic regimes around the globe and murdered an additonal 20 million members of the left). Real history does not support the continued rule of the fascist war machine so you have been denied real history. To return to the author's assertions that autocrats/fascists make better choices than the people: Hindenberg was elected chancellor. He abdicated and appointed Hitler. Hitler was not elected. Hitler then rounded up and murdered many of the worker's groups representatives that had opposed him (social democrats, communists, socialists, and union leaders). I usually reserve judgement but this educated and worldly author's use of this major lie can not be seen as a result of ignorance. This is well known history. Let me guess the pro-dictatorship crowd won't try to pass this lie off in Germany. They'd be laughed at ....after the people quit crying.

Never ever I thought that a socio-politico-economic treatise could be such a breeze. Not only is it an interesting book, but also one that will leave you on the edge of your 'thinking seat'.

Read on, read on.........

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5.0 out of 5 stars More is not always Better
Fareed Zakaria (born in India, Harvard PhD, Editor of Foreign Affairs, Editor of Newsweek's International Edition) examines Liberal Democracy in his recent book, The Future of... Read more

Published on July 15 2004 by Leonard J. Wilson

4.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual slight of hand
I throughly enjoyed Mr. Z.'s book. He took some dense information and made it into amazyingly light reading. Plus, I think Mr. Z. Read more

Published on May 14 2004 by Isaac Webster

5.0 out of 5 stars "And the survey says........"
Mr. Zakaria's thesis is that we live in a democratic age, but we'd be better off with less democracy, not more. Read more

Published on Mar 21 2004 by Gary C. Marfin

5.0 out of 5 stars Democracy and Constitutional Liberalism
A must read for any serious student of History and Political Science. A highly readable work.
Mr Zakaria develops well documented, lucid arguments to explain WHY democratic... Read more

Published on Feb 24 2004 by David E. Bassert Jr.

3.0 out of 5 stars Is democracy the best form of government for everyone?
The author of this book is the editor of Newsweek International and a political analyst for ABC news. Read more

Published on Jan 25 2004 by Linda Linguvic

4.0 out of 5 stars We've confused elections with freedom
"The Future of Freedom" is worth reading if only because it calls into question one of our most unexamined assumptions: that democracy is inherently good and that more democracy,... Read more

Published on Jan 16 2004 by amm6176

3.0 out of 5 stars Skillful political analysis but weak on history
Zakaria skillfully outlines a theory present in both the founding of the American Republic and one that appears in some relatively recent academia--i.e. Read more

Published on Jan 13 2004 by Evan N. Campbell

5.0 out of 5 stars Has Democracy Gone Too Far?
"The Future of Freedom" is a difficult book to review, in part because the author hedges his bets. The book contains many fragments of wisdom, but it also conveys one Big Idea:... Read more

Published on Jan 6 2004 by Larry Willmore

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be on Book of The Year List for 2003
I strongly recommend this book to anybody interested in public policy, particularly as it has pertains to the functioning of democracy both here and abroad. Read more

Published on Jan 4 2004 by John V. Kjellman

5.0 out of 5 stars Zakaria - a name worth remembering
Fareed Zakaria has long impressed me with his pointed essays in Newsweek magazine. In this book, he expounds on the role of institutions in government, primarily democratic... Read more

Published on Dec 30 2003 by Donald L. Stauffer

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