Is modern democracy a viable ideology and way of life?
The evidence for this is vigorously examined in David Runciman’s
The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis From World War I to the Present (Princeton University Press, 408 pages). The book, which focuses largely on the experience of the United States, argues that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity Hall, contends that democracy breeds complacency rather than wisdom because of its dangerous belief that it can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that he says may lead to a crisis that’s just too big to escape.
Runciman frames his interpretation of how
democracy has fared in modern times based on its ideal definition as “any society with regular elections, a relatively free press, and open competition for power,” in contrast with
autocracy, which is “any society in which leaders do not face open elections and the free flow of information is subject to political control.” In this context, Runciman asserts that the United States as a democratic nation had kept on lurching from success to failure—winning in unexpected victories like the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 and the defeat of communism in 1989, and surviving threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
“The factors that make democracy work successfully over time — the flexibility, the variety, the responsiveness of democratic societies — are the same factors that cause democracies to go wrong,” Runciman argues in
The Confidence Trap. “They produce impulsiveness, and short-termism, and historical myopia. Successful democracies have blind spots, which cause them to drift into disaster. You cannot have the good of democratic progress without the bad of democratic drift. The successes of democracy over the past hundred years have not resulted in more mature, far-sighted, and self-aware democratic societies. Democracy has triumphed, but it has not grown up… We know a lot more than we used to about how democracies succeed and why. What we don’t know is what to do with this knowledge. That is the problem.”
Read an excerpt from David Runciman’s The Confidence Trap in ForeignPolicy.com now! Read Jackson Lears’s “Mistakes Get Made,” a review of David Runciman's The Confidence Trap in TheNation.com now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:David Runciman is professor of politics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity Hall. His books include
The Politics of Good Intentions and
Political Hypocrisy (both Princeton imprints). He writes regularly about politics for the
London Review of Books.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In “Teach or Perish,” an article that came out in the February 2, 2015 issue of the
Chronicle Review, professor of Jewish civilization Jacques Berlinerblau at Georgetown University seriously questions the wisdom of the “publish or perish” mantra of American higher education. He advocates a re-visioning of the college professor’s job description to put premium on outstanding skills and passionate devotion to teaching and mentoring students on top of a strong potential for original and creative research. He laments: “Somewhere along the way, we spiritually and emotionally disengaged from teaching and mentoring students. The decision...has resulted in one whopper of a contradiction. While teaching undergraduates is, normally, a large part of a professor’s job, success in our field is (now) correlated with a professor’s ability to avoid teaching undergraduates.”
Read Jacques Berlinerblau's “Teach or Perish” in the Chronicle Review of Higher Education now!
