Democracy and the intellectuals

Democracy is on the march in the world today. By democracy I mean something like free and equal people associating and communicating in public spheres, informed by liberal presuppositions, and governed politically by representative institutions based on wide suffrage and contested elections. I do not say that democracy is victorious in the world today, because its reign is fragile in the developing world, is flawed in the developed world (especially in the United States), and is barely emergent on the international scene. Evaluation should be a comparative enterprise, however, and most people aware of the alternatives believe that they are better off under democracy, and democracy is more widely spread now than it has ever been before.

There were a handful of developing democracies a hundred years ago (Dahl 1989, 240). Democratic aspirations flared in continental Europe and areas under its influence as World War I came to an end, but Communism and then Fascism smothered the democratic flame. Fascism was discredited as World War II came to an end, and also political imperialism went into decline, only to be replaced by the realpolitik of the Cold War. The Communists were glad to extend their tyranny to broad new territories, and the democracies found it expedient to justify tyrannies among their subordinate allies. Meanwhile, Fascism was dismantled in Mediterranean Europe in the late 1970s, and the democratization of Spain and Portugal strengthened democratic forces in Latin America in the 1980s.