I came upon an interesting piece on decline and fall of liberal democracy. It's old. Perhaps you saw it when it was published. If you have any thoughts, I'd like to hear them.
National Review
February 6, 1995
Just when you thought history was over, liberal democracy faces what may be its greatest challenge yet. In the name of ``diversity,'' cultural democrats want to remake man in their image.
JOHN FONTE
Mr. Fonte is co-editor of Education for America's Role in World Affairs (University Press, 1994). He is a visiting scholar and executive director of the Committee to Review National Standards at the American Enterprise Institute.
THE Danish political scientist Georg Sorensen recently noted that ``the tradition that became liberal democracy was liberal first (aimed at restricting state power over civil society) and democratic later (aimed at creating structures that would secure a popular mandate).'' Today the liberal foundation of democracy is under an assault which, if successful, will transform democracy itself. An alternative world view, ``cultural democracy,'' has emerged, challenging the basic principles of liberal democracy on practically every important issue.
For the greater part of the twentieth century liberal democracy waged an epic ideological struggle against Fascism and Communism in every corner of the world. After more than seven decades, near the end of what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called ``mankind's most bloody and hateful century,'' liberal democracy emerged triumphant. Many Western commentators proclaimed the world-historical significance of this victory. Francis Fukuyama declared that we had reached the ``end of history.'' He predicted that the basic principles of liberal democracy would never again face serious opposition from a rival political philosophy with a universal appeal.
In fact, a cultural war over the very definition of democracy is now being fought in the United States and Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, and in Western Europe. The battlefields in this war are variously called multiculturalism, diversity, multilingualism, Balkanization, political correctness, racism, feminism, ethnicity, immigration, assimilation, the melting pot, the mosaic, the salad bowl, laOcite, droit * la difference, sovereignty, globalism, national identity, religious fundamentalism, cultural nationalism. In all these conflicts what is really being contested is whether liberal democracy will survive or whether it will be reconstructed into a new form of governance. This developing war of ideas between liberal democracy and cultural democracy may prove to be the most significant conflict of the twenty-first century.
As Professor Sorensen and others have pointed out, liberal democracy is a combination of two theories: liberalism (individual rights) and democracy (popular sovereignty). Thomas Jefferson declared that ``the first principle of republicanism [democracy] is Lex Majoris Partis'' -- majority rule or popular sovereignty -- because without some form of majority rule a people would not be sovereign or self-governing. Today the majoritarian principles of liberal democracy are increasingly under attack in the name of supranational and subnational ideals.
Writing in New Perspectives Quarterly, Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel remarks that ``the moral and political institutional scheme of liberal democracy no longer fits the moral and political aspirations of its citizens.'' He maintains that the liberal-democratic nation-state as ``the primary unit of sovereign self-rule'' is becoming increasingly obsolete. Sandel advocates a new type of regime that would increase autonomy to ``particular communities, be they ethnic, linguistic, or religious,'' and at the same time ensure the ``universalization of rights'' at a ``supranational level.''
Former Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis states that ``we are witnessing the explosion of the long obsolete model of liberal democracy.'' Democracy, he suggests, ``will either be reinvented or it will perish.'' In a similar vein, Jacques Attali, a key advisor to French President FranAois Mitterrand, declares that Western political leaders must ``have the courage to abandon traditional notions of national sovereignty.'' Strobe Talbott, when he was a senior editor at Time, predicted that by the end of the twenty-first century ``nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single global authority.'' He described the devolution of national sovereignty ``upward toward supranational bodies'' and ``downward toward'' autonomous units that permit ``distinct societies to preserve their cultural identities'' as a ``basically positive phenomenon.''
One of the most detailed of the obsolescence theorists is American futurist Alvin Toffler, who directly challenges the majority-rule doctrine. Toffler writes that only a short time ago we were celebrating ``the ultimate victory of liberal democracy,'' yet today we are ``wondering whether liberal democracy itself can survive into the twenty-first century.'' He states that ``the central fact of our times is the rise of a new postmodern civilization'' that is displacing modern liberal democracy and its core values of popular sovereignty and majority rule. Indeed, Toffler says, ``majority rule, the key legitimating principle of the modern era, is increasingly obsolete.'' Moreover, he insists that because minorities are ``often ignored or even victimized by a huge middle class,'' majority rule ``does not extend social justice; it may very well restrict it.''
Toffler favors a ``mosaic democracy'' throughout the Western world that would ``postmodernize the entire system'' and ``strengthen the role of diverse minorities.'' He recommends measures similar to those advocated by Lani Guinier, such as weighted voting on issues of special importance to ethnic minorities.
It is significant that the ideals of popular sovereignty and majority rule are not affirmed in most of the official civic-education documents being published today by state governments in the U.S., traditionally the world's most powerful liberal democracy. An important reason for this omission is that most American educators today (like their colleagues in Canada and Australia) adhere to some form of multicultural educational theory. The public-school curricula of Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Colorado, and California devote more space to multiculturalism and cultural diversity than to majority rule and popular sovereignty.
Multiculturalists are extremely uncomfortable with any form of majoritarianism and even with the very idea of an American people. The clearest example of the multiculturalist aversion to majoritarianism is the latest (1991) New York state curriculum guide, considered by many educators the cutting-edge document in curriculum reform. According to the guide, the United States consists of ``one nation, many peoples.'' The executive summary refers to ``the various peoples who make up our nation'' and ``our nation and the peoples who person it.'' There are many references to the ``peoples'' of American society in the 65-page document, but the words ``the American people'' never appear. If there is no people (as in ``We the people . . .''), but rather many ``peoples,'' the concepts of popular sovereignty and majority rule become meaningless. If leading American educators are unwilling to affirm such core liberal-democratic principles as popular sovereignty and majority rule in a key civic-education document, then the ideological hegemony of liberal democracy in America is open to question.
The challenge to the ``liberal'' half of liberal democracy -- individual rights, equality of individual citizenship, freedom of expression, and a private sphere free from political interference -- is more explicit and direct than the challenge to popular sovereignty and majority rule. Not only do important segments of the Western elite in education, government, and law question the traditional principles of liberalism; they essentially advocate an alternative world view: cultural democracy.
The Individual versus the Group
AT THE heart of the liberal-democratic world view is the concept of the individual citizen. Traditionally, the legal and moral authority of political liberalism is based on the rights and responsibilities of individual citizens, who are equal under the law and together form a self-governing free people. More than two decades ago, German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf wrote that the hallmark of a modern liberal-democratic society is the extent to which individually achieved status replaces the ascribed group status of premodern times in public life. Martin Luther King's dictum that people should be judged not by ``the color of their skin but by the content of their character'' is a quintessentially liberal idea because it asserts the primacy of the individual over the ascribed group.
Ideally, liberal-democratic citizens will form many voluntary associations to achieve various political and other goals. The liberal civic culture (particularly in the United States and in varying degrees throughout the West) is thus marked by a tradition of voluntary pluralism and citizen participation that has been described by political observers from Tocqueville and Bryce to Almond and Verba.
On the other hand, for the large numbers of Western academics, politicians, and bureaucrats who may be described as cultural democrats, the major actors in the civic culture are no longer individual citizens operating through voluntary associations, but distinct peoples, ethnic groups, and cultural blocs with their own world views, values, histories, heritages, and sometimes languages, which often require different legal rights and separate educational programs. Cultural democrats not only de-emphasize the role of the individual citizen but weaken the concept of citizenship itself by blurring the distinctions between citizens and non-citizens. For example, in many Western countries there is a growing advocacy of voting rights for non-citizens.
Furthermore, cultural democrats reject the view that liberal-democratic values should be, as they put it, ``privileged,'' determining the rules of the civic culture. Instead, they depict civic culture as an arena of ``contestation'' and ``negotiation'' among competing values, world views, peoples, and cultural groups. The liberal-democratic world view is simply one ``perspective'' among many and should not ``dominate'' other perspectives. Writing in Social Education, the leading American social-studies journal, a California education professor, Sandra J. LeSourd, questions whether ``a civic culture founded upon a uniform philosophical heritage has a moral right to judge actions inspired by alternative heritages.''
Liberal democrats emphasize freedom of political expression with few restrictions (mainly in wartime or if the liberal regime itself is threatened). As the more than three hundred speech codes on North American campuses indicate, cultural democrats do not accept this traditional liberal ideal of free expression. They are particularly interested in restricting speech that, as they see it, promotes racism and sexism, weakens the power of ``traditionally oppressed groups,'' or creates a ``hostile environment'' for diversity.
Central to the West's ideological war against Communism was the defense of a private sphere free from political interference. Liberalism holds that private life is by nature non-political and that it should be free from ideological pressure. During the Cold War defenders of the West would have considered the proposition that ``the personal is political'' to be inherently totalitarian. Today, however, cultural democrats insist that private actions and attitudes can reinforce the ``ideological hegemony'' of dominant institutions and belief systems, and therefore that the ``personal'' is an arena in the struggle for power among groups and a legitimate political concern.
Both liberal democracy and cultural democracy are buttressed by strong unifying symbols and energizing myths. Liberal democracy has unifying symbols that are universal (self-government, freedom, etc.) and others that are particular (the American Dream, the mission of French civilization). Cultural democrats recognize the importance of the particular (although they favor symbols of various cultural groups, as opposed to symbols of national identity), and also have put forward a set of universally appealing unifying symbols and energizing myths. They stress the struggle against oppression -- against racism, sexism, and the patriarchy -- and the struggle to transform society, to create a new world and a new ``person'' free of the social pathologies that reinforce the ``status quo.''
Significantly, the cultural-democratic world view is more universalist than relativist. Indeed, there are strong grounds for arguing that cultural democracy's relativist rhetoric is often a tactical device employed to delegitimize the normative values of liberal democracy rather than the expression of a firm commitment to relativism per se. When advocating the construction of a new society, cultural democrats of necessity emphasize their own set of normative values. As Jerry Martin, a former official of the National Endowment for the Humanities, puts it, ``All the talk of hegemony and domination, inclusion and empowerment, rests on strong normative commitments, a belief in radical egalitarianism and the transformation of people into `better' people.'' In a parallel argument, Fordham law professor Kenneth Anderson insists that the push for cultural diversity in the United States ``is not really about cultural diversity, but rather cover for demanding political conformity -- the political conformity of the `diversity' agenda.''
<snip> The document is too long to fit in one post...
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