Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Free and Fair Elections: False Hope

Just as there are actions that can promote beneficial change, there are also actions that hamper progress. One of the most popular unhelpful solutions is an election. Leaders at risk often decide to hold fraudulent elections to create the impression of openness and fairness. Needless to say, bogus elections don’t move a country toward better policies or more freedom for the people. Rather, fake elections empower the ruler by increasing the ranks of the interchangeables without adding in any meaningful way to the size of the influential and essential groups.

True, meaningful elections might be the final goal, but elections for their own sake should never be the objective. When the international community pushes for elections without being careful about how meaningful they are, all that is accomplished is to further entrench a nasty regime. International inspectors, for instance, like to certify whether people could freely go to the polling place and whether their votes were properly counted, as if that means there was a free and fair election. There’s no reason to impede the opportunity to vote or to cheat when counting votes if, for instance, a regime first bans parties that might be real rivals, or if a government sets up campaign constraints that make it easy for the government’s party to tell its story and makes it impossible for the opposition to do the same. Russian incumbents don’t need to cheat in counting votes to get the outcome they want. They don’t need to block people from getting into the polling place. They deprive the opposition from having access to a free press and from holding rallies so, sure, observers will easily conclude that elections were free and fair in the narrow sense, and just as easily we can all recognize that they were neither really free nor fair.

Ultimately, elections need to follow expanded freedom and not be thought of as presaging it!

Sometimes the problems of the world seem beyond our capacity to solve. Yet there is no mystery about how to eradicate much of the world’s poverty and oppression. People who live with freedom are rarely impoverished and oppressed. Give people the right to say what they want; to write what they want; and to gather to share ideas about what they want, and you are bound to be looking at people whose persons and property are secure and whose lives are content. You are looking at people free to become rich and free to lose their shirts in trying. You are looking at people who are not only materially well off but spiritually and physically, too. Sure, places like Singapore and parts of China prove that it is possible to have a good material life with limited freedom—yet the vast majority of the evidence suggests that these are exceptions and not the rule. Economic success can postpone the democratic moment but it ultimately cannot replace it.

A country’s relative share of freedom is ultimately decided by its leaders. Behind the world of misery and oppression lie governments run by small cliques of essentials who are loyal to leaders who can make them rich. Behind the world of freedom and prosperity lie governments that depend on the backing of a substantial coalition of ordinary people drawn from a large pool of influentials, who are in turn drawn from a large pool of interchangeables. It is not difficult to draw a line from the poverty and oppression of the world to the corrupt juntas and brutal dictators who skim from their country’s revenues to stay in power. Politics, and political institutions, define the bounds of the people’s lives.

By now it should be clear that there is a natural order governing politics, and it comes with an ironclad set of rules. They cannot be altered. But that does not mean that we cannot find better paths to work within the laws of politics.

We have suggested some ways to work within the rules to produce better outcomes. At the end of the day, the solutions we have suggested will not be applied perfectly. There are good reasons for that. Entrenched ways of thinking make altering our approach to problems difficult. Many will conclude that it is cruel and insensitive to cut way back on foreign aid. They will tell us that all the money spent on aid is worth it if just one child is helped. They will forget to ask how many children are condemned to die of neglect because, in the process of helping a few, aid props up leaders who look after the people only after they have looked after themselves and their essential backers, if at all. But before we shift blame onto our “flawed” democratic leaders for their failures to make the world a better place, we need to remember why it is that they enact the policies that they do. The sworn duty of democratic leaders is to do precisely what we, the people, want.

American presidents, virtually since the nation’s founding, have routinely endorsed the idea, if not the reality, of spreading democracy. President Woodrow Wilson, in calling on the Congress to declare war against Germany on April 2, 1917, reflected his deeply held view that, “The world must be made safe for democracy.... We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion.” His sentiment was echoed nearly ninety years later when George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address, proclaimed, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world . . . So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Yet Wilson set his noble sentiments aside when it came to standing up for self-determination in the colonies controlled by America’s allies. In the same spirit, President Bush, during the same speech in which he called for democracy “in all the world,” also noted: “My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people against further attacks and emerging threats.”

The president’s “solemn duty” highlights the problem. There is an inherent tension between promoting democratic reform abroad and protecting the welfare of the people here at home. Free, democratic societies typically live in peace with each other and promote prosperity at home as well as between nations, making representative government attractive to people throughout the world. Yet democratic reform, as the experiences of the United States with Khomeini’s Iran and Hamas-led Palestine make clear, does not always also enhance the security or welfare of Americans (or citizens elsewhere in the world) against foreign threats and may even jeopardize that security.

Our individual concerns about protecting ourselves from unfriendly democracies elsewhere typically trump our longer term belief in the benefits of democracy. Democratic leaders listen to their voters because that is how they and their political party get to keep their jobs. Democratic leaders were elected, after all, to advance the current interests at least of those who chose them. The long run is always on someone else’s watch. Democracy overseas is a great thing for us if, and only if, the people of a democratizing nation happen to want policies that we like. When a foreign people are aligned against our best interest, our best chance of getting what we want is to keep them under the yoke of an oppressor who is willing to do what we, the people, want.

Yes we want people to be free and prosperous, but we don’t want them to be free and prosperous enough to threaten our way of life, our interests, and our well-being—and that is as it should be. That too is a rule to rule by for democratic leaders. They must do what their coalition wants; they are not beholden to the coalition in any other country, just to those who help keep them in power. If we pretend otherwise we will just be engaging in the sort of utopianism that serves as an excuse for not tackling the problems that we can.