| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
|
 Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2015 10:31 am Post subject: China, markets and democracy |
 |
|
Very interesting food for thought in this essay reviewing a series of books, particularly John Dunn's, "Breaking Democracy's Spell." http://www.thenation.com/article/200041/great-chastening#
| Quote: | How to explain the rapid rise of China if markets are essential for efficient distribution of economic wealth and efficiency? I particularly was struck by these obsrevations:
Americans may like to think they are better governed than the Chinese, but the only identifiable advantage they can hold up in their favor is that they have the right to replace a tier of their government at regular intervals. However, this rejectionist spirit all too often becomes the sole raison d’être of democracy. (Among the so-called minimalists of democratic theory, from Joseph Schumpeter to Adam Przeworski, it often is cited as its saving grace.) To demand democracy in Egypt during the Arab uprising more often than not meant to demand the end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. “The people want the fall of the regime” was the chant that filled Tahrir Square. Democracy provided no reliable guide for what to do after the strongman fell...
As Fukuyama sees it, the American state, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, stopped running according to Madisonian principles, in which the disarray of interest groups was supposed to produce something recognizable as the public interest. It requires ever more elaborate fictions to believe that even the “spontaneous order” of the market could satisfy such an interest. In Fukuyama’s infinitely expansive historical tapestry, the capture of the American state by elite interests and lobbying groups is comparable to the “repatrimonialization” of the Chinese state in the Later Han dynasty or to France’s ancien régime. In itself, the problem of repatrimonialization in America would be solvable in the sort of anticorruption campaigns engineered in the past to purge the bureaucracy of rent-seeking, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s progressivist campaign in the 1900s.
But the second problem Fukuyama finds in the American state makes this more difficult. The checks and balances of the Madisonian system allow too many opportunities to derail reform. The never-ending character of American budget negotiations gives lobbyists and interest groups repeated chances to kill legislation. This is what Fukuyama refers to as the American “vetocracy.” By contrast, both the German and the British states have comparably fewer veto players and have formal restrictions that make vetoes less easy to perform. The German Federal Republic has provisions for a “positive” vote of no-confidence: “a party cannot topple a government coalition…unless it can put together an alternative government” in its place. The United Kingdom does not allow individual interest groups and politicians to veto individual items on the national budget. Instead, the entire budget is presented to the Parliament, which must either veto it or approve it all at once. Fukuyama takes this to be a more genuinely democratic system. If British voters don’t like the kinds of policies their current government is passing, they are free to vote the government out in less time than it would take Americans to vote out a president or congressional representative. This means the British government is supposedly more accountable for its overall performance than for its ability to provide pork barrel benefits to special portions of the electorate. (Fukuyama neglects to explain, however, why the short terms of US representatives only seem to render them less accountable.) |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2015 9:02 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| My GOD, mac ... what is it about conflict that gives you an orgasm? I don't even have to lift my shields to guess that you think democracy, aka the "mob rule" our forefathers warned us against, is a GOOD thing. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
|
| Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2015 9:42 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| How sad. No effort to read an article before flaming. Not surprising though. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum
|
|
|
Search
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Register
