If the outcome of our nation’s latest democratic procedure baffled you, you might be interested in Chilton Williamson Jr.’s latest book, After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy.
Williamson scours nearly two centuries of the written record of intellectual pontification about democracy and democratic principles, then spells out some cheery conclusions about democracy’s future.
Modern democracy and industrialism, which once worked so well together, now work against each other. Mass industrial society, by nature hedonistic, selfish, and narcissistic, is no longer a society comprising independent persons or autonomous social institutions and arrangements suited to, or capable of, democratic self-government; the social-democratic welfare state that was created in response to industrialism is hostile to free enterprise and efficiency in industry, preferring instead the corporate statist or social model, neither of which is efficient in terms of profit or production in the long run. Moreover, the self-serving closeness of industry to government, and of government to industry, has discredited both in the eyes of the public, which persists in its naive belief that the Western nations remain, in spite of everything, “democracies,” or that they can somehow regain their lost democratic identities. Western citizens demand the goods that both socialist government and industrialism deliver, but they are jealous and resentful of the interlocking, reinforcing powers of industry and government. Finally, the environmentalist Left has succeeded in compromising industrialism’s reputation as the bearer or prosperity and progress and the means by which humanity can somehow transcend itself, as a growing number of people associate it with climate change and environmental degradation, whether or not they are ultimately willing to forego its benefits.
Mass disillusionment is always a potent cause for generalized anger, unrest. and disruption, especially when the grounds for disillusionment are real.
“But wait!” you interject. “We live in a republic, not a democracy.” See John Hood’s analysis of those contrasting terms.
