The uncomfortable truth about America’s cafeteria Democrats (with a small ‘d’)

The reason that I, the father of two college students, periodically lecture at universities is that I am always surprised to see what it looks like when someone of my daughters’ age actually listens to me. Admittedly, the students have no choice. Still it is a refreshing change of pace from what happens around the house. (I kid. Ever since we instituted spot quizzes at home, the girls have been much more attentive.)

Also, of course, I learn far more from students than I ever did from teachers. They ask good questions. They come with fewer preconceptions. They challenge conventional wisdom. Or at least some in every class do and even those who come with a set of pre-packaged views often provoke interesting discussions.

That happened in a class I spoke to today here in DC. It was a group of visiting students from around the world and we pretty much covered the waterfront of topics. We discussed the non-scientific nature of most foreign-policy analysis and the fact that if most "experts" didn’t actually explore or understand all the critical variables driving a situation that really made them more like "guessperts." We discussed the imbalances in the world and the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of the few — and how the recent crisis could have remedied this but probably actually only demonstrated and increased the power of those few.

And then one student suggested that when I spoke of such concentrated power that I sounded like Karl Marx. I don’t think it was a compliment. And he asked if I was a "small-‘d’ Democrat" and if so, didn’t I believe that democracy was actually an effective way of counterbalancing the power of the few.

Naturally, living in Washington as I do, I’m a little cynical on this issue. Because this is a town in which democracy is preached from every pulpit — and treated as reverentially as scripture — but also one in which two centuries of practice have gradually prised the term away from its philosophical foundations and attached it to something altogether different and corrupt.

I began by explaining that if, as in the United States, the Supreme Court determines, for example, that "money is speech" you lose the meaning of real democracy — because of course, the idea of free speech is that it is a right everyone has because all can speak but not everyone has money and the idea of money as speech gives the most speech to those with the most money. I then extended this out to show that while we may preach the virtues of democracy abroad, we certainly compromise those virtues at home thanks to our perverse campaign finance system, the power we give to special interests within that system, the subtle ways we concentrate power in the hands of the few be they senators who can threaten filibusters or states by virtue of their electoral clout, etc. It’s a long list.

In fact, at home and abroad we Americans tend to practice a kind of cafeteria democracy-wherein, like "cafeteria Catholics," we pick and choose from a menu of options rather than acknowledging that real democracy doesn’t offer such choices. Nowhere, I suggested is this more clearly the case than with regard to the view of America or the American government toward international democracy. We sell it. We treat it as if the idea had a "Made in America" label on it, though I would think in today’s world that ought to prompt and IPR dispute in the WTO with the Greeks and the British and a host of others.

But even as we try to persuade the world — sometimes even at the point of a gun — that democracy, giving a voice to each individual, governments who derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, is the best of all political systems, we clearly don’t mean it. Because if you ask an American whether they believe in concepts like "one man, one vote", they nod vigorously in assent. But ask them if they think that if China has four or five times as many people as America they should have four or five times as a great a say on global issues and they will recoil. Ask them if they think that because America has only four percent of the earth’s population that we should only have four percent of the "voice," they would rebel and immediately argue that our status, our standing, our history, our armies, our economy, something justifies a greater say.

Which is saying, of course, that we are not actually "small ‘d’ democrats," but rather that we don’t actually believe in democracy. Like cafeteria catholics, we choose to believe in democracy to the degree to which it suits us and to believe in special interests, the power of the buck, or the power of the nuclear arsenal when they better fit our ambitions. The distinction mattered less when the affairs of nations were contained primarily within their borders. It matters more with every day that critical decisions need to be made on issue of truly global scope, consequence and causes — be they environmental, related to health, associated with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the spread of culture, the sharing of intellectual property.

We proselytize one religion and practice another. It’s an approach history has shown is unsustainable for churches and one which will ultimately prove to be unsustainable for "champions of democracy" like the United States as well.