Don’t get Blinder wrong. He didn’t want to disenfranchise the population, but, rather, to give their values and long-run welfare more effective expression in government. In his scheme, “value judgments” would still be made by elected representatives, but “technical judgments” were left to the technocrats, allowed to pursue the broad objectives set by the representatives who appointed them. The voters were cast as both Ulysses’ sailors and the sirens: binding government to the mast so it couldn’t respond to them later. In case of regret, they could always choose to undo the shackles, though that process should be neither easy nor quick. [...]
What if, Zakaria asked, racists and fascists prevailed in the free and fair elections of the Balkans? Would you rather live in democratic Haiti or the “liberal semi-democracy” of Antigua? Should we promote the spread of democracy in the Middle East if this created regimes that “would almost certainly be more illiberal than the ones now in place?” In Zakaria’s account, it was the liberal part of liberal democracy that had led to the flourishing of the West, and when the two sides come into conflict, it was the liberal part that should be defended. [...]
It may seem odd to forecast the end of “the age of party democracy” at a time when, by many measures, democracy is more pervasive than ever before. In 1900, almost no country in the world extended universal suffrage. By 2000, almost two-thirds did, covering 58 percent of the world’s population. [...]
In theory, there is nothing stopping sovereign power from altering or repealing the legal framework on which capital depends. Once upon a time, democracy was seen as a genuine threat to capitalism. This fear motivated the composition of all the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classics Zakaria draws from in his defense of the “basic liberties” against the encroachment of “illiberal democracy.” The prospect of extending the vote to the propertyless terrified the propertied. And not without reason — redistribution and regulation were the point of getting the vote for many who fought for it. [...]
Mair helps us understand the decline of the social-democratic party, and therefore the conditions for its potential rebirth. Parties do not simply reflect a set of preferences that are out there in the electorate — they help shape and articulate those preferences. Parties have to be successful on two fronts: they must build and maintain electoral popularity, and they need effective policy strategies that account for the economic context in which the capitalist state is embedded.
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