Rating: 
Summary: A Great Beginning, But Falls Off at the End
Review: Most Westerners would probably agree that democracy is the best political system for any group of people, anywhere in the world. From China to Chile, from Latvia to Laos, the cure for what ails the body politic is to set up a democracy, and let public opinion naturally take its benevolent course. Western pressure from governments, and through international organizations and NGOs, has often pushed developing countries into taking that path. But is democracy -- defined strictly here as one-man/one-vote -- the right path for them to take? In "The Future of Freedom," Fareed Zakaria says that this is an incomplete question. It is not, he argues, so much that democracy is the right or wrong path; instead it is more accurate to say democracy is but a part of the process of development and a capstone to successful modernization. Zakaria explains that liberalization -- state-guaranteed civil and economic freedoms -- preceded democratic reforms in both most successful democracies of the West and, more recently, in the consolidated democracies of the developing world. To strip democracy of this context is to misunderstand it and to jeopardize its continued success. This is why so many states struggle to consolidate their democracies and often slip back into anarchy or dictatorship. Zakaria gives a tightly argued rundown of political systems around the world, finishing off with a very good chapter on the problems of democratization in the Islamic world (spotty record: some good, some bad), especially the Arab world (terrible record -- almost no good news to report). In this section, Zakaria is confident as he surveys the political situation around the globe, as one would expect from the editor of Foreign Affairs. However, in the final two chapters, Zakaria turns to the United States to broaden his attack on democracy, and it is here that his book begins to falter. What was a sharp comparative analysis looking at different states in the international system transforms into an educated rant against -- among other things -- anti-elitism. Zakaria says that the recent turn in the U.S. towards fuller participation in the political system has had the perverse effect of increasing voter apathy and antipathy towards that system. He argues that elites need some space away from interest groups and public pressure if they are going to be able to run the state's affairs with any efficiency. Zakaria clearly wants to use this part of the book to make a general point about democracy everywhere, but the linkage doesn't work. It is one thing to make arguments about developing countries where there is some sort of template for success in consolidating democracy, but it's difficult to see what that has to do with fully developed democracies, where each of them is scratching their way towards some unknowable future. Zakaria makes some fine points in this part of the book. It's fascinating to see how little power California's governor and legislature have over their budget because of the public's ability in that state to vote directly on referendums and initiatives. I also found it interesting that public opinion is so favorable towards the federal courts, the Federal Reserve, and the military, even though they are among the government agencies least susceptible to public opinion. But despite these fair points, Zakaria's arguments here fail to coalesce into a strong case, and he clearly is not in his element in this section of the book. As a whole, however, "The Future of Freedom" offers a sharp argument that democracy is not a panacea for politics, but a general goal to be lightly applied, especially in developing countries.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This is an excellent book. It explains why many (illiberal) democracies in the developing world are not living up to the economic expectations of its citizens. Corruption at all levels of government due to a lack of a system of check and balances is the main problem. There is a lot to learn in this book about how to set up a functioning liberal democracy. I thank Mr. Zakaria for explaining what a truly constitutional liberal democracy is and I hope some day many of my fellow citizens will understand that too.
Rating: 
Summary: Democracy, the insidious threat
Review: Fareed Zakaria is an intellectual whose time has come. Handsome, foreign-born, a possible candidate for the first Muslim Secretary of State, he has the sort of cachet the mass media love. His only problem is that he is a shallow conventional thinker with nothing intelligent to say. But that isn't really a problem for American journalism. The United States is a country where you can say anything you want. But being listened to, if you are to the left of Michael Kinsley or Robert Kerry, is another thing entirely. In the absence of real debate we have pseudo-debate and here Zakaria can shine. His thesis is that we are threatened with too much democracy. Rich and wealthy businessmen do not have sufficient power to insulate themselves and the world economic system from democratic pressure. It's an appalling injustice. Zakaria does not put his argument quite like that. Instead he argues that while Americans naturally wish to encourage free elections in the world, those free elections have the unfortunate habit of electing people like Yeltsin, Putin and Chavez. They would probably elect all sorts of nasty fundamentalists in the Middle East if those countries deigned to have elections. What these countries need is not more democracy, but more liberal constitutionalism. This means not merely the rule of law and an independent judiciary, but also vigorous action to encourage the free market economy and open investment. At the same time American democracy has weakened liberty by unwise congressional reform leading to lobbyists while plebiscites and initiatives have paralysed local government. It is nice to have Zakaria admit, after decades of Republican cant against elites, that it is really conservative economists who would like to form an elite protected from public scrutiny and debate. But otherwise this is a shallow book. For a start, Zakaria is a remarkably sloppy writer. Thessalonica is a city, not a tribe, and the vicious massacre that he cites occurred there, not in Milan. The National Assembly is confused with the Revolutionary Convention. The final deal between Clinton and Arafat is dated well into Bush's presidency, while the last Mexican presidential election is placed in the wrong year. Disraeli's support for the Second Reform Act is placed in 1882, after he had already died. "The masses, Bismarck believed, would always vote for the pro-monarchial conservatives. He was right." No, he was wrong: soon majorities voted for Socialists, Catholics and Liberals. Zakaria has Saddam Hussein using biological weapons against his own citizens, when he clearly means chemical weapons. At other times Zakaria is simply tendentious. In trying to present a relatively favourable picture of Islam as a whole, he notes that the four largest Islamic countries, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, have all elected female presidents or prime ministers. He neglects to add that they were all elected because they were the closest relatives of leading male statesman. Much of his discussion of the origins of democracy is conventional guff about the rise of the Catholic Church, the Reformation, the success of Britain, while the Third French Republic gets only a sentence. More serious are the limitations of Zakaria's picture. He notes how successful liberal democracy has been after military pro-market dictators in Chile, South Korea and Taiwan. He forgets that Chile was a successful liberal democracy for decades before Pinochet overthrew it in 1973, and that Sri Lanka has, despite a brutal civil war, been both more democratic and more liberal than South Korea. Certainly the Germany of Bismarck, von Bulow and Bethmann-Hollweg was more liberal, more democratic and arguably even more capitalist than the South Korea of Colonel Park. He credits South Korea's progress to its attachment to the market and ignores the special hothouse conditions of the cold war that encouraged its rise (Japanese investment diverted there from a blockaded China, more American aid than given to all of Africa for a start. He never asks what the "liberal" consensus of "The New Republic" and "The National Review" has done to deserve Arab support, or, after their support of Yeltsin, Russian support. Often Zakaria pines for a prosperous middle class, which will bring democracy. Yes, I remember how we were all inspired in 1980 when the Communist regime in Poland was brought to its knees by the strike of Gdansk shipyard's middle management. Likewise, COSATU did far more to encourage South African democracy than Paton or Oppenheimer, and one can make the same statement for South Korea, Brazil and much of the rest of the world. Zakaria blames many of the United States' current problems on excessive democracy. He blames primaries for destroying the old party elites, but that did not stop them from ensuring the nomination of Bush I, Clinton, Dole, Gore and Bush II. He ignores the fact that many of the "democratic" reforms he blames are actually "liberal" ones, such as The Independent Counsel Act and initiatives against raising taxes (a model Hayekian measure). Zakaria comments about media vulgarity, but he ignores signs of media concentration and the oligarchic Telecommunications Act. He blames California's problems on excessively democratic machinery, and not on a ruthless well-organized elite that benefits from an electorate skewed against California's large Hispanic minority. One would better off reading Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" and "Dead Cities." Likewise one would be better off reading Lizabeth Cohen on credit cards and Deborah Rhode's "In the Interests of Justice," rather than blaming "democracy" for the fall of legal integrity. His vision of democracy says nothing about free trade unions, gender equality, social welfare or diversity of public opinion. And while he might want Alan Greenspan to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board For Life, what do the rest of us do if the economy should ever sink? At the end he twists Woodrow Wilson's famous statement of "making democracy safe for the world." Or for capitalism. Or for the Republican Party. Whichever is easier, and more profitable.
Rating: 
Summary: Elitists Will Love It!
Review: First of all Zakaria puts words together well. His use of the English language is beautiful, making this book a pleasure to read. However, I have some very real concerns with this book. When Peter Jennings says this book, "...is important for all Americans and those who would make American policy" I have reason for concern. Actually, there are very specific reasons why I'm troubled by this book. Let me tell you why. 1. Zakaria is correct; today we judge the value of every idea, institution, and individual by one test: is it popular? Leaders who are daily blown by winds of change cannot focus on long-term objectives. However, leaders who bend to whimsical political pressure are not practicing 'democracy' - nobody's casting votes here - they're simply demonstrating how little backbone they have. 2. I do agree with Zakaria that democracy is not 'inherently' good. I disagree with him on why this is. Democracy is very similar to freedom, and freedom itself is not 'inherently' good. Why?...because freedom can be used for both good and evil. Free will creates an opportunity to choose that which is not good. Democracy does that same thing. A person can vote for a good leader, or a person can vote for a bad leader - the institution of democracy makes no distinction. 3. Zakaria believes that democracy 'needs strong limits' to function properly. No, I would suggest that democracy 'needs good people' to function properly. See, this is an important difference - and it's not a very politically correct statement. However, a democracy of thieves and robbers will result in leaders and laws that reflect the values of criminals. I believe that's self-evident. 4. Zakaria brings up the example of 1933 Germany electing the Nazis to power. Instead of denouncing the voter's inability to wisely discern, Zakaria blames democracy itself. He joins the ranks of the 'blame democracy first crowd'. Regarding 1933 Germany, democracy was merely the tool. The tool was not broken - it's the user! This was a prime case of 'user error'. 5. Here's the fundamental problem with Zakaria's book. Instead of starting at the grass-roots and explaining the essential importance of educating people in both knowledge and morality, Zakaria questions if democracy is the best governmental option. This is a critical mistake. 6. I'm not saying the democracy will work at any time at any place. I'm not naïve about that. However, I am willing to say why it won't work at any time and any place, and the answer has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with a people group's values. Not all values are equal. Not all values are good. Not all values are equally conducive to democracy. 7. Alexis de Tocqueville said, "America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." This could be said about any democracy, anywhere in the world. A democracy devoid or morals is chaos. I wish Zakaria recognized this and encouraged a means for a better - aka 'good' populous - rather than deriding democracy itself. 8. We do not live in a perfect world, and there are no perfect forms of government. Winston Churchill's famous quote is good to remember, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." It is the least of all evils. Yes, there is a downside to democracy, but there is nothing better. Zakaria's push for an elitist government - a country run by the few - is not only a bad option, it is a disastrous one that fails to consider the nature of the human condition.
Rating:
Summary: Illiberal Thoughts?
Review: Fareed Zakaria's The Future Of Freedom is a timely exposition on many subjects of current concern in this era of regime change. As scary as it sounds at first, Zakaria makes a solid case for NOT shoving a recently freed country immediately towards one person, one vote. He stresses the need for a country that wants to be a good liberal democracy to start with constitutional liberalism (protecting individual liberties, establishing the rule of law, and setting up a good system of checks and balances) before having free and fair elections, lest that country end up as an illiberal democracy with a freely elected despot as a leader. Zakaria uses historical examples from all over the planet and back 200 years and more. I thoroughly enjoyed The Future Of Freedom and recommend it highly, especially to people that think that nation building only means getting folks to the first election.
Rating:
Summary: Great cover--Liberty leading the people
Review: Whenever I see Delacroix' Liberty Leading The People on the jacket of a book, I freeze--must read, more than repressed orality, genuine revolutionary fervor. But then again, I read somewhere most of the hotheads in the picture went to become stock brokers. Hmm, Marx's bourgeois revolutionaries. We should hope at least Dr. Fareek is right up there on the barricades. However, noticing Gress' From Plato to Nato in his bibliography, I suspect a 'fix' on democracy courtesy of the neo-conservative thinktanks. Don't be fooled by such nonsense. Did they fool Dr. Fareed, or is he one of them?
Democracy arose, was revived, because such as Rousseau focussed on equality. That's that. Sometimes it takes, sometimes the form misfires.
If the author is referring to the need to find ways to implement democracy, that is one thing. But in the American case he seems to blame the public for the triumph of the special interests who have gutted real democracy. Blaming the victim.
Gress' book seems the source of this book's sophistical conservatizing distinction of democracy and liberty, from the attempt in Gress' book to cashier the Greeks and find the birth of freedom in the Romans, Germanics, and the Christian tradition. All this in the critique of the 'Grand Narrative' purloined from the postmoderns. One feels little gratitude for postmodernists finally, as we find the Pakistani dictator Musharaaf endorsed in the nagging against 'too much democracy'. A bit convenient. Noone quite has the nerve to advocate oligarchy by declaring freedom a modernist metarnarrative delusion, the Grand Narrative. But this book seems to come close. I hope that is not unfair. In any case, this work is challenging to think through the issues, and makes a number of useful points on the flaws of 'democratic institutions', but is threatened by incoherence, in the middle of a series of otherwise useful discussions. It is interesting at least for demonstrating that our terms of political philosophy can indeed go into free fall, and start wandering from their moorings in the hustling fixes of 'interested' parties. We cannot make complacent use of these terms, and need to study their history carefully indeed. There is no magic, as the far left obviously discovered most disastrously, in invoking a term, and the realizations of democracy require creative history. That said, a spade is a spade.
The historical emergence of democracy requires a general concept of universal history, and this modern thought has lost, as it huddles near the very few classic realizatons of the form, confounded by its inability to replicate that evolution. Then we can perhaps distinguish the differences of Rome and Greece that confuse the analysis. But to praise Romanism for its liberty in a dismissal of the Greeks,a la Gress, seems to me unhelpful, though nice work by the neo-conservatives with their conceptual minefields designed to confuse the next generation. Perhaps that is Dr. Fareed's real point, and excuses the fearful manipulations of concepts that foretell only a reluctance toward its own theme. Either one trusts the people or one does not, and without democracy it is sheer distortion to speak of liberty.
But this issue of 'liberty' in the book is reasonable enough up to a point, if we consider the foundational republicanism required for democracy to emerge. The parallel emergence of republicanism and democracy (contrast, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine, then the Jacksonian era)is indeed the potential sore point for those who come later and attempt to follow the natural evolution of history with the unthinking imitations. But in the final analysis, democracy means what it says, and to put off doing things right until some magic moment arrives after the blessed tutelage of reactionaries makes no sense, and reminds one of the ironically similar confusion in Marx's term 'dictatorship of the proletariat': democracy, but not just yet.
There is a lot more to this book than this.
One thinks of a work such as Miller's Rousseau, Dreamer of Democracy, recording the moment when the term 'democracy' was up in the air, before its crystallizaton in electoral form.
Consider the irony of the conservative attacks on Rousseau for latent totalitarianism. The wheel turns, comes full circle.
Rating:
Summary: correction
Review: a review below, by one "sbix," makes a serious charge about Zakaria's father which is complete BS. The author's father has had a very impressive career in Indian politics, was a pillar of the Congress Party for decades in Maharashtra, and is the exact opposite of corrupt. He founded and still runs a major charity that provides educational opportunities for the poor. Just goes to show you have to be very careful about where you get your information from...
Rating:
Summary: Zakaria Is Right, but Hardly Novel
Review: Democracy is a means not an end. The end is maximum freedom and adequate order. The founding fathers knew this. Walter Lippman reminded us continuously of this before WW II (The Public Philosophy). Even Lani Guanier knew this. Democracy must be surrounded by non-democratic, or even anti-democratic institutions -- Constitution, Bill of Rights, two house legislature, presedential veto, separation of powers, independent judiciary, judicial review, extraordinary majorities (>50% vote needed to ammend constitution).... to be safe for freedom. It's time again we thought of this.
Rating:
Summary: An important work with hypocritical viewpoints
Review: I enjoyed this book, and I strongly suggest buying it. It is very well-written and organized. Zakaria essentially seems to suggest that highly-trained, intellectual elites are best suited to ruling some cultures in lieu of democracy. I personally believe that governments derive their authority by the will of their people, and that only through a democratic (he terms it as populist) structure can a government truly represent the will of the culture it governs. Zakaria would contend that a culture might prefer/choose NOT to have a democracy, but the hypocrisy arises in the fact that only through such a popular democratic decision could a democracy be tossed aside-as he points out NAZI Germany's election of the NAZI party and the subsequent demise of that nation's democracy. I would point out that the hypothesis of select few governing is exactly what happened there, and it is proof that democracy must be preserved despite its many shortcomings. Zakaria is very correct in pointing out that democracies do not always work, but that is more likely a reflection of the beaurocracy and litigation created to preserve the power and authority of the elite as well as a passive permissiveness of the electorate. That passive permissiveness is exactly what happened in the US in it's 2000 election when only 50% of the electorate chose to participate, and only 25% of those eligible to vote actually voted in the next President. Zakaria is completely correct in that a democracy's success is directly correlated to the participation of the people it governs. However, the arguments that appointed organizations are better suited to rule is greatly flawed and dangerous. I have yet to find any real organizations of elitist appointees-not democratically chosen-that has worked out well. In fact, every single dictatorship and beaurocratic-blocked ruling institution that I've examined has either become horrifically evil or stagnant, immobile, inflexible, and incapable of action (see also United Nations history of forceful intervention in post-WWII genocides).
Rating:
Summary: A clear, concise and timely worldview...
Review: Fareed Zakaria dismantles the view that democracy, in and of itself, is a cure-all for mankind's social ills. In fact, he reserves some high praise for countries like Chile and Singapore, which liberalized their economies first and their political systems later. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman worked closely with Chile in liberalizing their economy in the seventies and eighties and Friedman claimed the experience changed his mind about the priority of political freedom in relation to economic liberty, saying he came away realizing that economic freedom was the foundation of all other liberties. Zakaria is not hesitant to suggest that democracy isn't applicable to every culture, an idea that is highly controversial within the borders of the United States, but that's part of what makes this book so compelling, especially for those interested in the possible dynamics involved in our current attempt to "democratize" Iraq. Even more controversial is Fareed Zakaria's critique of the current "descent of democracy" in America. In Zakaria's view, American democracy has morphed into "a simple-minded populism" that too often values style over substance. A lot of readers approach such public policy analyses with trepidation, but Fareed Zakaria is incredibly readable! He makes what so many people regard as "policy wonk stuff," accessible to laymen and professionals alike. The "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad" is not just a riveting read, it's a book that couldn't be more timely.
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