Why Democracies Flounder and Fail

526 Pages·2019·3.475 MB·English

by  Michael Haas

MICHAEL HAAS
Why
Democracies
Flounder
AND Fail
REMEDYING MASS
SOCIETY POLITICS
Why Democracies Flounder and Fail
Michael Haas
Why Democracies
Flounder and Fail
Remedying Mass Society Politics
Michael Haas
Los Angeles, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-74069-0 ISBN 978-3-319-74070-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74070-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936618
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover image © Lanmas / Alamy Stock Photo
Cover design by Thomas Howey
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer
International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Dedicated to the memory of democratic theorist
Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014)
P
reface
Democracies are in trouble today. The British vote to break away from the
European Union in 2016 pitted an establishment of duly elected public
officials against a hitherto unrecognized set of opponents, yet the oppo-
nents won because voters felt that their problems had been ignored by the
power structure. That same year, within the United States, non-Democrat
Bernie Sanders was almost nominated by the Democratic Party for presi-
dent while calling for some kind of “revolution,” and non-Republican
Donald Trump was nominated by the Republican Party for president,
often assailing the party’s establishment as being out of touch with the
people. Both Sanders and Trump offered solutions to problems that were
very divisive—economic in the case of Sanders, and sociocultural for
Trump. Then, after denying basic facts and making outlandish promises
that were sometimes muddied or reversed, Trump was elected president.
Elsewhere, and in different eras, democracies have floundered, sometimes
with dangerous consequences, including revolutions and wars. Now at
least one key democracy seems on the brink, and others around the world
seem in danger of failure.
Democracies are difficult to sustain but are ordinarily managed well
because elites and the masses enjoy the benefits and do not want to lapse
into anarchy or dictatorship. However, the fundamental principles of
democracy, especially the warning signs of imminent collapse or societal
disaster, are only vaguely understood. Accordingly, the book advances
democratic theory by explicating the Mass Society Paradigm.
I use the word “flounder” to capture the essence of the stage of demo-
cratic crisis before failure—an image of fish on land struggling to stay alive
vii
viii PREFACE
by making awkward movements. The word has an origin in several
Northern European languages and means blundering, stumbling about
clumsily and even helplessly, making mistakes, faltering, wavering—and
muddling through badly, to use Charles Lindblom’s (1959) term. I offer
the term to describe when democracies are on the verge of collapse.
Insofar as democracies make decisions and build institutions for the
common good, they should be supported. But sometimes democracies let
the people down because officeholders only pretend to represent them.
The result can be the failure of democracy—replacement by a more
authoritarian form of government or anarchy.
My interest in the subject arose during the chaos of the McCarthy
period of the 1950s and later in courses taught by Robert Dahl and Robert
Lane at Yale. I was then inspired to begin research on the collapse of the
French Fourth Republic, as presented herein, as well as on governments
of indigenous peoples from Yale’s Human Relations Area Files (Haas
2014c:ch6). My dissertation at Stanford, later condensed into a chapter in
a book edited by Dave Singer (Haas 1968), was about what was later
called “diversionary theory,” a component of what I now call the Mass
Society Paradigm.
When I accepted a teaching position at the University of Hawai’i, I was
amazed to learn, to my increasing satisfaction, how government in the
Aloha State gradually became a paragon of warm responsiveness to the
wishes of the people. That experience prompted How to Demolish Racism:
Lessons from the State of Hawai’i (2016) and inspired the present volume.
I consider the multiracial communitarian politics of the Aloha State as a
model for the world, though oddly few people elsewhere seem interested
in the lessons to be learned from that society.
During a summer spent in Singapore in 1987 studying Asian regional
cooperation on a Fulbright research grant, I was stunned to see on televi-
sion Singapore government officials accusing Catholic humanitarian vol-
unteers of being aligned with a Marxist plot to overthrow the
government—a replay of the McCarthy era. That lay Catholics seeking to
protect Filipina homeworkers from being raped by their Singaporean
employers were seeking to overthrow the government seemed incredu-
lously far fetched. Several years later I edited The Singapore Puzzle to bring
out the truth about the country’s totalitarianism (1999, 2014d).
Bureaucratized nonresponsiveness from the governments of the City of
Los Angeles and the state of California came into view after I retired from
the University of Hawai’i to regain residence in what had been my home
PREFAC E ix
town while I was a teenager after my parents moved from Detroit while I
was 12. After my experience in the Aloha State, I realized that evidence of
the operation of the Mass Society Paradigm was responsible for much of
my disappointment.
Although readers may imagine that the election of Donald Trump as
president of the United States stimulated me to write the present book,
that is not the case. The proposal was written beforehand. Perhaps the
publisher was motivated by Trump’s election, as the contract appeared
after election day 2016.
The first glimmer of the book came when I was writing Mr. Calm and
Effective: Evaluating the Presidency of President Barack Obama (2012b),
which relates how Republicans in Congress decided to block the presi-
dency of Barack Obama for partisan reasons even when there was general
agreement among moderates of both political parties on measures in the
national interest. One obvious partisan reason is simply that the Republican
Party was facing an uncertain future, as the demographics of the country
suggest that Caucasians some day will become one of several nonmajority
groups in the United States. Republicans were more interested in political
survival than in compromise or diversity for the good of the country.
While writing chapters on the Mass Society Paradigm for my books
International Relations Theory (2017) and Political Science Revitalized
(2017), the election drama of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald
Trump, and other presidential candidates stimulated me to contextualize
what has gone wrong in the American political system, similar to other
cases, within the framework of the Mass Society Paradigm. In contrast,
most researchers have focused on specific problems of democracy without
seeing the need to offer a larger picture. Because international studies and
political science today lack paradigmatic visions, I decided that the present
volume would focus on one paradigm in depth, proving that the Mass
Society Paradigm applies at several levels of analysis, one of the essential
requirements for a paradigm.
I therefore integrate many pieces of research, including some of my
own, so that the floundering of democracy can be better understood.
Democracies may then learn how to respond to warning signs before fail-
ure results. Figure 2.1 is reproduced from Figure 5.2 on page 64 of
Institutional Relations Theory: Competing Empirical Paradigms and
Figure 7.1 on page 125 of Political Science Revitalized: Filling the Jigsaw
Puzzle with Metatheory, both with the kind permission of Lexington
Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield. Figure 3.1, although first
x PREFACE
published in the French version of Political Parties: Their Organization
and Activity in the Modern State by Maurice Duverger in 1938, has been
translated and republished by Methuen Publishing, a division of Routledge,
which kindly allows my redrawn version. The book was originally pub-
lished in French by Colin.
In writing the present volume, I wish to acknowledge the assistance of
Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, Harry Eckstein, Robert Gilsdorf
of the University of Alberta, Ted Robert Gurr of the University of
Maryland, Patrick James of the University of Southern California, Travis
Johnson of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, my former
University of Hawai’i colleague Yasumasa Kuroda, Los Angeles Times col-
umnist David Lazarus, Duke University Professor Sally Nuamah, my
spouse Vorathep Sitthitham, helpful librarians at the University of Southern
California, and the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Anca Pusca.
Because I am primarily extending the democratic theory of my former
teacher Robert Dahl, the book is dedicated to his memory.
Los Angeles, CA, USA Michael Haas
c
ontents
Part I Democracy and Mass Society 1
1 Democracy: Components and Types 5
2 Mass Society Paradigm 31
Part II Intensive Case Studies 67
3 Immobilism in the French Fourth Republic 69
4 Singapore’s Totalitarian Mass Society 99
5 Gridlock in Washington 139
6 Global Mass Society 229
Part III Implications 289
7 Remedies for the Perils of Mass Society 291
xi