The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria

Author:Fareed Zakaria [Zakaria, Fareed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Economics & Politics
ISBN: 9780393324877
Amazon: 0393331520
Barnesnoble: 0393331520
Goodreads: 2447
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services Inc.
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Too Much of a Good Thing

THEY SAY THAT money can’t buy happiness, but you would think $5 trillion would make a dent. In the last quarter-century the United States has added just that amount to its real gross domestic product,1 and yet every survey and measure that psychologists use suggests that Americans are no happier than they were twenty-five years ago. Not only is the country richer, it is in better shape in almost every way. Most Americans barely remember how broken their country seemed in the early 1970s. Battered by the humiliation of Vietnam, it was struggling with stagflation, oil crises, race riots, and rising crime. But over the next two decades, the U.S. economy boomed almost uninterruptedly,* per capita income rose by 50 percent, crime declined, race relations improved, cities began thriving again, and every component of the so-called misery index dropped. Internationally the change was even more dramatic. By the early 1990s the Cold War was won, communism was destroyed, socialism discredited, and America towered above the world politically, economically, militarily, and culturally. You would think that such success would cheer anyone up.

Except that Americans don’t quite see it that way. Despite progress on all these fronts, they think that something has gone fundamentally wrong with their country—specifically, with their political system. Simply put, most Americans have lost faith in their democracy. If you examine what lies underneath America’s disquiet, you will find that the troubles of American democracy are similar to those being experienced by countries across the globe. The democratic wave has hit America hard, perhaps harder than any other Western country. Founded as a republic that believed in a balance between the will of the majority and the rights of the minority—or, more broadly, between liberty and democracy—America is increasingly embracing a simple-minded populism that values popularity and openness as the key measures of legitimacy. This ideology has necessitated the destruction of old institutions, the undermining of traditional authority, and the triumph of organized interest groups, all in the name of “the people.” The result is a deep imbalance in the American system, more democracy but less liberty.

A foreigner might think it odd to be told that the world’s most powerful democracy is experiencing a crisis of faith, but it is. If this sounds extreme, consider the simplest and most compelling statistic, the decline in trust toward the nation’s capital, the symbol of its political system. In the early 1960s the vast majority of Americans—more than 70 percent—agreed with the statement, “You can trust government in Washington to do what is right all or most of the time.” After thirty years of slippage, that number is now close to thirty percent. Survey respondents did show increased trust in Washington right after September 11, 2001: a Gallup poll in October 2001 found 60 percent trusting Washington all or most of the time, but that figure returned to pre–September 11 levels by June of 2002. Even with the renewed sense of urgency that the battle

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