Gotham Diary:
Impatience
26 August 2013
On this morning’s New York Times Op-Ed page, editor and columnist Bill Keller calls (“Adrift on the Nile“) for a withdrawal of United States aid to the “generals” currently in control of Egypt. I can’t make up my mind about the money, but I am quite sure that Keller is dangerously deluded about the nature of democracy, whether in Egypt or in the United States, at least insofar as he believes democracy to be something that is established in the latter country, and exportable to the former.
In fact, the late Morsi government revealed with sun-saturated clarity that the democracy toolkit is missing a very important piece. We all understand that democracy requires free and fair elections, and the Islamic Brotherhood, after decades of repression, won more votes than any other party. Fair enough. But nobody really knows, not in Egypt, not in the United States — maybe in the United Kingdom, where these things were first worked out but, famously, never written down — what to do next.
Mohamed Morsi and his colleagues exercised power along majoritarian lines. Having won those votes, his government believed itself to be entitled to disregard its political opponents, particularly the cosmopolitan secularists who live mostly in Egypt’s cities, and to lead Egypt toward theocracy. This is pretty much what Hitler did after winning his election, with the difference that he himself was the god, unhampered by ancient scriptures. I would support any number of generals in the undertaking to dislodge such a regime.
Even our cherished mantra, “checks and balances,” does not provide useful insight into the majoritarian problem of democracy. Checks and balances are supposed to prevent the concentration of power in too few hands. But power is not the only problem in a democracy, and “the majority rules” fails as a maxim in the long run because majority rule invariably decays into what minorities rightly come to regard as oppressive occupation. We sense that minorities ought to be respected in a democracy, but we have no clear way of distinguishing benign dissidents — the loyal opposition — from malignant ones. The Constitution is silent on the mechanics of identifying the loyal opposition and giving it voice. This is not surprising, for the Constitution was drafted in a climate of very uneasy antagonism, which it awkwardly and hideously attempted to resolve by counting “unfree persons” (slaves) on a discounted basis for the purpose of establishing state populations and hence congressional representation. The Southern states, in other words, entered the Union as a semi-loyal opposition. Not only were they determined to preserve slavery in the teeth of Yankee hostility, but they insisted on inflating their size on the backs of their slaves.
Over the course of the next seventy years, the people of the majority became convinced that the minority, pro-slavery view was malignant. A terrible, very bloody war was fought, and the majority (eventually) won. Slavery was extinguished. But among the flurry of Constitutional amendments that crowned the majority victory, no provision was made for avoiding a repetition of the conflict, and the theory and practice of loyal opposition was ignored. It still is. We still rely on ad hoc, pragmatic solutions to governmental impasses. We wait for them to happen, as if counting on miracles. Sooner or later, impatience does the trick. But impatience can never be a part of orderly procedure.
The very idea of loyal opposition is unnatural. We are naturally hostile to our opponents — that’s just human nature. But it is to curb and correct the impulses of human nature that we subject ourselves to the confusion and inefficiency of democratic governments. We understand the role of elections in democracy, but that’s where our wisdom stops. We don’t know how to recognize or accommodate loyal opposition. We tend to mistake for it the minuet of political parties, a profoundly cooperative enterprise even in times of legislative gridlock. There is no loyal opposition currently at work in Washington. It wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. (Take your pick: George Packer’s earnest The Unwinding or Mark Leibovich’s rollicking This Town.)
Majoritarian oppression is unlikely in the United States because the nation is so plural. We’re said to be polarized, these days, but we’re polarized along a multiplicity of poles. Guns, health care, free markets, unions, education — there aren’t enough people aligned identically on these and other issues to seize control of the government. In Egypt, as in other Islamic countries, it is different, because there is one overarching issue: religion. The majority position in the West is that religion has no place in the operation of a democracy. The people of what used to be called “Christendom” learned this lesson in a succession of bloody conflicts that preceded American independence. A few leaders of Islamic countries, most notably Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, have sought to keep religion out of government, but the restraint tends to be elitist and unpopular. Ordinary Egyptians and Syrians have yet to internalize the rule that religious democracy is impossible. Ordinary Americans can’t show them the way, because, while we learned the lesson, we didn’t finish the course. Until we do — until we develop an articulate and functional doctrine of loyal opposition — we ought to refrain from oppressing the world with our own half-baked conception of democracy.