This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“The factors that make democracy work
successfully over time – the flexibility, the variety, the responsiveness of
democratic societies – are the same factors that cause democracies to go
wrong. They produce impulsiveness, and
short-termism, and historical myopia.
Successful democracies have blind spots, which cause them to drift into
disaster. You cannot have the good of
democratic progress without the bad of democratic drift.” – David Runciman,
Preface, Page XV
“Newspaper hysteria was only part of the general problem:
crisis might be good for a democracy, but democracies are not good at
recognizing crises. They overreact; they
underreact; they lack a sense of proportion.
That is why it was so hard to know what sort of crisis would enable a
democracy to learn its lesson. If the
crisis turned out to be so bad that no one could doubt it was real, then there
was always a risk that it would end in disaster. If it did not end in disaster, then there was
always a risk that it would be filed along with the other overblown crises of
democratic life as a false alarm. And
even the real crises – the ones no one could doubt – were hard to learn
from. If democracy doesn’t survive,
you’ve learned your lesson, but at an unacceptable cost. If democracy does survive, then you may learn
the lesson that democracy can survive any crisis. Instead of making you wise, recovering from
your mistakes can make you reckless.” – David Runciman, Introduction:
Tocqueville: Democracy and Crisis, Page 25
“In a crisis, elections can be a godsend or a curse. They are a godsend if they provide a chance
to ditch the people responsible for the mess.
They are a curse if they make it impossible for anyone to take the tough
decisions needed to get out of the mess for fear of being turfed out by the
voters.” – David Runciman, Chapter 7: 2008: Back to the Future, Page 278
Is This An Overview?
Different forms of government have their advantages and
disadvantages. An advantage of
autocracies and aristocracies is that they can respond to a crisis quicky and
decisively with long-term agendas. The
disadvantage is that once those decisions have been made, the people are stuck
with those decisions as the leaders lack adaptation methods. A disadvantage of democracies is that they
have difficulty coordinating action on short-term notice. The advantage is that democracies are
constantly experimenting, finding different ways to overcome a challenge.
Democracies are better equipped to overcome long-term
problems due to methods of adaptation, but being able to adapt does not make
democracies any wiser than before.
Overcoming a crisis through adaptation can teach the wrong lesson, that
the democracy can overcome any crisis. Successfully
overcoming a crisis makes democracies complacent to problems, and behave
recklessly for the assumption is that problems could be overcome. Recklessness, complacency, failure to take
action to correct a problem, creates crises.
This is democracy’s confidence trap.
For confidence in being able to overcome a crisis, creates the
crisis. While past crises have been
overcome, that does not mean knowing that adaptation is possible to a future
challenge.
Possibility of adaptation comes from elections. Elected officials need to change their minds
to stay in power, unlike unelected officials who are afraid of public opinion as
they seek to control public opinion. Elections
are a tool that can be used as an opportunity to remove those who are making
mistakes and change the ideas being used.
But elections can also prevent officials from making tough decisions for
fear of how the voters will respond. Officials
are quick to change decisions, which develops a myopic political
situation. The future of democracy is
evanescent, for no democratic behavior is representative of what the democracy
will do in the future.
Caveats?
Although various democracies are represented, as the author
acknowledged, the focus is on the democracy of United States of America.
The author reflects on various commentators of
democracy. The interpretations often
lack background information about the content of the claims, and different
people can have different interpretations of the claims than those provided by the
author.
