DEMOCRACY: If You Can Keep It

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by Jean-Francois Revel

This was the reason that, in my book Democracy Against Itself (1993), I took a cautious position in the face of an optimism that seemed to me excessive and far too euphoric. Some of the formerly Communist countries have indeed taken steps down the path to economic, political, and cultural freedom, but others--above all Russia--have not succeeded in tearing themselves loose from the consequences of the Communist past. Russia still remains under the thumb of the oligarchs of the former nomenklatura. Agriculture, completely destroyed by Stalin and his successors under the "scientific" guidance of Lysenko, has been unable to revive. The rule of law scarcely exists. The market economy is thriving only in its mafia variant, which was already in place during the Soviet period, though unacknowledged. It would seem that escaping the consequences of Communism is harder than escaping Communism itself.

In countries that no longer are Communist, or, like China, are in the process of throwing off Communism, ideology may be dead, but practices deriving from it seem almost beyond eradication. In nations that never were Communist, by contrast, it is ideology itself that has gained a new lease on life. One feature marking the decade from 1990 to 2000 is the immense effort and unbelievable ingenuity displayed by the international Left in democratic countries, to avoid drawing lessons from the failure of Communism. True, most Western Communist parties have vanished or become marginal, changing their names and their doctrines; and Socialist and social-democratic parties have shifted towards the center, accepting the market economy, privatizing what was nationalized, and freeing exchange rates. But ideological debate still remains dominated by opponents of capitalism and the market, even in countries like the United States and Britain where the Communist Party was always tiny and politically negligible. The urban guerrillas who took to the streets against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in December 1999 showed that protest against globalization is founded on anti-capitalist polemics drawn straight from the purest Marxism. The ideological success of these informal groups and organizations, quasi-religious as much as they are non-governmental, draws its inspiration from a generalized hatred of the open society. The media in Europe by and large sympathized with the slogans of the rioters and presented the failure of the Seattle meeting as an outcome to be welcomed. Here is a striking paradox: The lesson that some powerful opinionmakers appear to have drawn from the implosion of Communism is that it is capitalism that stands condemned, and more widely liberalism, as it used to be called in the traditional European political vocabulary, carrying the implication of private property and political and economic freedom.

The totalitarian phenomenon is not to be understood without making allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or--much more mysteriously--to submit to it. Democracy will therefore always remain at risk. Never will history see the end of the totalitarian temptation, for it is rooted, not in some socio-historical determinism, but in human nature: Marx can provide us no explanation for Marxism.