A tyrant is a single ruler holding vast, if not absolute power through
a state or in an organization. The term carries connotations of a
harsh and cruel ruler who places his/her own interests or the
interests of a small oligarchy over the best interests of the general
population which s/he governs or controls. This mode of rule is
referred to as tyranny. Many individual rulers or government officials
are accused of tyranny, with the label almost always a matter of
controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrant
The phrase tyranny of the majority, used in discussing systems of
democracy and majority rule, is a criticism of the scenario in which
decisions made by a majority under that system would place that
majority's interests so far above a minority's interest as to be
comparable in cruelty to "tyrannical" despots.
Limits on the decisions that can be made by such majorities, such as
constitutional limits on the powers of parliament and use of a bill of
rights in a parliamentary democracy, are commonly meant to avoid the
problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
The Future of Freedom - Illiberal Democracy at Home & Abroad
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393047644/
- Direct Democracy
The idea of taking government directly to the people is as old as the
United States of America. Actually, older: the first referendum was
held in 1640 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And throughout the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, federal and state constitutions
were presented to the people for ratification. But once these
constitutions were adopted, creating a system of government,
referendums died out. Throughout the nineteenth century courts
routinely ruled that referendums were unconstitutional, citing the
long-established doctrine that once the people had delegated
legislative powers, they could not selectively take them back-delgeta
postesta non potest delgari. Representative democracy, in the
nineteenth-century view, could not function if there were end runs
around it.
All this changed, starting in South Dakota in 1898. The Gilded Age of
the late nineteenth century produced great fortunes and firms. Big
business-particularly the railroads-often had strong ties within state
legislatures, creating a cozy relationship between money and politics.
(Decades later, Americans were shocked to discover similar
arrangements in the emerging economies of Asia and denounced them as
crony capitalism.) Progressive reformers were appalled and frustrated
by this well-entrenched corruption and decided to bypass the
legislatures altogether, taking public policy directly to the people.
They pushed through amendments to state constitutions that allowed for
referendums, initiatives, and recalls-all designed to give the public
the ability to override the power of the special interests who ran the
legislatures. (The other important Progressive reform was the
constitutional amendment establishing the direct election of senators,
who until the early 1910s were elected by state legislatures.)
Progressives believed that they would return politics to a purer,
uncorrupted state, since the common man, and not the wealthy few,
would rule. At the heart of these reforms, the historian Richard
Hofstadter wrote,
"was the Man of Good Will. ... He would think and act as a public-
spirited individual, unlike all the groups of vested interests that
were ready to prey on him. . . . Far from joining organizations to
advance his own interests, he would . . . address himself directly and
high-mindedly to the problems of government."
By the 1920s most states had established laws allowing for some form
of direct democracy. But as politics was cleaned up and the
Progressive era waned, so did the zeal for referendums. From the 1930s
to the early 1960s they declined in frequency and import. But in the
late 1960s, as attacks mounted against the "establishment" and
rhetoric soared about participatory democracy, the idea of going
directly to the people was revived, most vigorously by the left wing
of the Democratic Party. Although its intellectual proponents were
mostly on the left, however, the initiative movement got its most
powerful boost a decade later from the right. In 1978 Howard Jarvis
organized California's Proposition 13 and in so doing, the legend
goes, changed the course of American history.
Proposition 13 mixed two quite separate issues: taxes and referendums.
Taxes of all kinds had risen all through the late 1960s and 1970s, as
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, entitlement spending, and new urban
initiatives all blossomed. (In the 1960s you got elected, believe it
or not, by promising to raise people's taxes and spend them on
grandiose public schemes.) In California, a housing boom in the 1970s
had caused property taxes to skyrocket, and the state legislature
seemed unwilling to cut taxes even as surpluses swelled into billions
of dollars. Proposition 13 proposed a massive rollback, pushing taxes
back to their 1975 levels and setting limits on how much they could be
raised.
Despite much public anger about high taxes, Proposition 13 was not
expected to pass. Jarvis was viewed as a crank. The San Francisco
Chronicle described him as "a choleric seventy-five-year-old gadfly
who saw taxes as government-licensed theft." California's leading
political figures all opposed it, including the state's foremost
conservative, former governor Reagan, who thought it too extreme.
Polls a month before the election showed that supporters and opponents
of the initiative were in a statistical dead heat and almost 20
percent of voters were still undecided. Then, three weeks before the
June vote, the Los Angeles County assessor released his annual report
showing a staggering increase in property taxes. The story hit at
precisely the right moment and, riding on a wave of indignation,
Proposition 13 passed with 65 percent of the vote.
After the election results the establishment jumped kangaroo-style on
the bandwagon. Jarvis the buffoon became Jarvis the political genius,
appearing on the covers of Time and Newsweek and meeting with foreign
leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Jacques Chirac. A few weeks
after the vote Reagan urged Republicans to "use the California vote on
Proposition 13 to light a prairie fire of opposition to costly and
overpowering government." They did. Proposition 13 put tax-cutting at
the heart of the Republican Party agenda. Many Democrats embraced its
message, as well. California's liberal governor, Jerry Brown, declared
himself a "born again" convert on the issue. Politicians around the
country began drawing up tax-cutting plans. New Jersey's Democratic
Senate candidate, Bill Bradley, campaigned on a pledge to help reduce
federal taxes by $25 billion. Five months after Proposition 13's
passage, in November 1978, sixteen states held referendums on tax
policy.
But there was another, more powerful legacy of Proposition 13, which
was the first referendum in four years on the California ballot. It
provided a new, magically simple way around the cumbersome process of
changing public policy. Instead of voting scores of legislators out of
office or lobbying them to vote on bills, why not pass laws directly?
The number of referendums had already grown by the 1970s, but after
1978 they spread like Reagan's prairie fire. In the 1960s voters
across the country were asked to legislate on 88 issues. That number
grew to 181 in the 1970s and 257 in the 1980s. By the 1990s, the
number of initiatives had almost quintupled, to 378. In 2000 alone,
voters decided on 204 pieces of legislation, concerning everything
from health care and education reform to gay rights and physician-
assisted suicide.
Has it worked? The last two decades saw a sustained experiment with
the mechanisms of referendum, initiative, and recall. It is, of
course, easy to look at any one issue on which the public voted
correctly-in one's view-and say, "This system is much better because
it produced a good result; the legislature would never have passed
this law." This explains why the right has been so enamored with
initiatives over the past few decades. How can one look a tax cut in
the mouth? But the results of one piece of legislation are a short-
sighted way to judge systemic change. After all, voters may also vote
in favor of many things of which one strongly disapproves. As the left
has gained ground and won referendums on its own causes, conservatives
have shifted their attitudes about California in a comical about-face.
Ever since the Richard Nixon and Reagan years brought triumph to
conservatism in that state, it was axiomatic on the right that
California was the national bellwether. Its referendums pointed to the
future. But now, as California's liberal majorities have begun to pass
their favored policies, conservatives have decided that the nation's
most populous state is in fact a weird, atypical la-la land, out of
touch with America. Now, for conservatives, its referendums are
symbols of the past. As liberal victories grow in other states,
however, conservatives might wonder why they liked this strange
initiative process in the first place. Liberals, on the other hand,
who had long grumbled about populist lawmaking, are rediscovering
their love of the referendum. Until of course, the tide turns once
again.
Some might argue that referendums at least put new issues on the table
that political elites refused to discuss. Not really. Take taxes, for
example. Proposition 13 probably accelerated the rise of tax cuts on
the national agenda. But the trend was already in the air and
politicians were latching on to it. By the late 1970s, Americans were
showing signs of disenchantment with big government and had been
voting conservative politicians into office at all levels. More than
gas lines and stagflation, more than the cultural rebellions of the
1960s, more even than Soviet expansion, taxes were the big issue of
American politics in the late 1970s. Pollster Richard Wirthlin said,
"You have to go back to the Vietnam war to find such a focus on an
issue." Although Proposition 13 gave a powerful push to the tax-
cutting cause, the Republican Party had already embraced it, the
Democrats were running scared, and public opinion on the issue was
overwhelmingly clear. If Proposition 13 had not happened, tax cuts
would likely have moved forward just as fast.
The better yardstick by which to judge initiatives is whether law-
making by plebiscite has advantages over lawmaking by legislature. And
what are the effects of this new system of direct democracy? The best
place to search for an answer is in California. In many ways
California is the poster child for direct democracy, having
experimented most comprehensively with referendums on scores of
issues, big and small. California also may well be a herald of what
lies ahead. It is America's most populous state, with an economy that
mixes farming, the new economy, and old defense industries. Its
population is multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious, even
multilingual. Most important, California has often led the country,
indeed the world, in technology, consumption, trends, lifestyles, and
of course, mass entertainment. It is where the car found its earliest
and fullest expression, where suburbs blossomed, where going to the
gym replaced going to church, where goat-cheese pizza was invented.
And the technological and ideological forces that lead so many to
assume that direct democracy is the wave of the future-declining
political parties, telecommuting, new technology, the Internet
generation-are all most well developed in this vast land. Outside of
Switzerland-which is an oddity, not a trendsetter-California is the
fullest manifestation of direct democracy in the world today. And if
California truly is the wave of tomorrow, then we have seen the
future, and it does not work.
- California Dreaming
No one disputes the facts. In the 1950s and early 1960s California had
an enviable reputation as one of the best-run states in the union.
"No. 1 State," said a Newsweek cover from 1962, "Booming, Beautiful
California." Time agreed; its title read "California: A State of
Excitement." There was much to be excited about. The state's economy
was booming, and with moderate tax rates it had built extraordinary
and expanding public resources, from advanced highways and irrigation
systems to well-run police forces to breathtaking parks and zoos. The
state's crowning achievement was its world-class public-education
system, which started in kindergarten and ended with the prestigious
University of California campuses. Californians seemed blissfully
content, annoying intellectuals in the cold, damp Northeast to no end.
("All those dumb, happy people," said Woody Allen.) But for the rest
of the world, sunny, prosperous, well-managed California symbolized
the dazzling promise of the United States. California was the American
dream.
California today is another story. In the spring of 2001 California
was plunged into blackouts and electricity shortages that reminded me
of India. (In fact they were worse than anything I experienced growing
up.) Sure, California is home to Silicon Valley and Hollywood, two of
the greatest centers of American industry and creativity. But that is
its private sector. Its public sector-indeed its public life-is an
unmitigated mess. The state and local governments struggle each year
to avoid fiscal crises. Highways that were once models for the world
are literally falling apart, and traffic has become both a nightmare
and an expensive drag on productivity. In the 1950s California spent
22 percent of its budget on infrastructure; today it spends barely 5
percent. Public parks now survive only by charging hefty admission
fees. The state's education system has collapsed; its schools now rank
toward the bottom in the nation when measured by spending or test
scores or student skills.
The University of California system has not built a new campus in
three decades, despite the fact that the state's population has
doubled. And yet, as the veteran journalist Peter Schrag points out in
his penetrating book Paradise Lost, it has had to build twenty new
prisons in the last two decades. In 1993 the Economist concluded that
the state's "whole system of government was a shambles." Three years
later the bipartisan Business-Higher Education Forum, which includes
corporate executives and education leaders, reported that without
major change "the quality of life will continue to decline in
California with increasing transportation problems, rising crime and
social unrest, and continued out-migration of business." And this was
written at a time when the U.S. economy was at a thirty-year high. The
best evidence of California's dismal condition is that on this one
issue, both right and left agree. Echoing Schrag, who is a liberal,
conservative commentator Fred Barnes explained in a cover story for
the Weekly Standard that the states government had stopped working:
"California has lost its lofty position as the state universally
envied for its effective government, top-notch schools, and auto-
friendly transportation system."
Not all California's problems can be traced to its experiment with
referendums and initiatives. But much of the state's mess is a result
of its extreme form of open, non-hierarchical, non-party based,
initiative-friendly democracy. California has produced a political
system that is as close to anarchy as any civilized society has seen.
Consider the effects of the recent spate of initiatives. After
Proposition 13 passed, the state passed dozens of other initiatives,
among them Proposition 4 (which limited the growth of state spending
to a certain percentage), Proposition 62 (which requires super
majorities in order to raise taxes), Proposition 98 (which requires
that 40 percent of the state budget be spent on education), and
Proposition 218 (which applied to local fees and taxes the
restrictions of Proposition 13). Yet the state legislature has no
power over funds either, since it is mandated to spend them as
referendums and federal law require. Today 85 percent of the
California state budget is outside of the legislature's or the
governor's control-a situation unique in the United States and
probably the world. The vast majority of the state's budget is "pre-
assigned." The legislature squabbles over the remaining 15 percent. In
California today real power resides nowhere. It has dissipated into
the atmosphere, since most government is made via abstract laws and
formulas. The hope appears to be that government can be run, in
Schrag's words, like "a Newtonian machine immune to any significant
control or judgment by elected representatives. This not only turns
democracy into some fun-house contortion of the ideal but makes it
nearly impossible to govern at all.
Even with referendums dictating what they do, politicians are still
required to translate these airy mandates into reality. The
initiatives have simply made this process dysfunctional by giving
politicians responsibility but no power. Experiences with referendums
in places far from California confirm that this is not a problem
unique to the golden state. The Connecticut Conference of
Municipalities (CCM) determined that 72 of the state's 169
municipalities held referendums to approve the budgets proposed by
their city executive. Of those 72, 52 had to hold additional
referendums, often more than once, because the proposed budgets were
rejected. Most of these referendums required local officials to cut
taxes and yet improve services. "You have to be a magician to
accomplish those dual purposes," complained James J. Finley, the CCM's
legislative services director.
The flurry of ever-increasing commandments from the people has created
a jumble of laws, often contradictory, without any of the debate,
deliberation, and compromise that characterize legislation. The stark
"up or down" nature of initiatives does not allow for much nuance or
accommodation with reality. If in a given year it would be more
sensible to spend 36 percent of the California budget on schools
instead of the mandated 40 percent, too bad.
As another unintended consequence, the initiative movement has also
broken the logic of accountability that once existed between
politicians and public policy. By creating a Byzantine assortment of
restrictions over the process of taxing and spending, the voters of
California have obscured their own ability to judge the performance of
their politicians. When funds run out for a particular program, was it
that the legislature allocated too little money, or that local
communities spent too much, or that statewide initiatives tied their
hands? You can imagine the orgy of buck-passing that must ensue, given
California's 58 counties, 447 cities, and over 5,000 special
districts. Lack of power and responsibility inevitably produces a lack
of respect. California's state government and its legislature have
among the lowest public-approval ratings among American states. Having
thoroughly emasculated their elected leaders, Californians are shocked
that they do so little about the state's problems.
Consider, for example, the difference between California's attempts to
tackle illegal immigration and affirmative action, both of which were
handled through plebiscite, and the national government's tackling of
welfare reform, which was done through legislation. Unquestionably,
the path of welfare reform looked longer and more arduous. Its
proponents had to launch a national debate, muster enough votes in
both houses of Congress, and then convince President Clinton to sign
it, which he finally did the third time a bill was sent to him. But in
that process of debate, back-and-forth, and compromise, a bipartisan
solution was arrived at that addressed some of the concerns of both
sides. That solution was also phased in gradually, as befits any major
legislative change in a large country. As a result, welfare reform had
broad political support, was viewed as legitimate, was given the time
and the resources to work, and was implemented in a manner that did
not spark a backlash. It is now widely regarded as a success, and
congressional Republicans and Clinton both cite it as one of their
proudest accomplishments.
Contrast this with Propositions 187 (on immigration) and 209 (on
affirmative action). Organized groups, with the backing of some
politicians, took the issue outside the political parties and the
legislature, outside of the normal political process, and waged a
costly television campaign. They won, and both propositions became
law. But because there had been no legislative process, no compromise,
no vetting of any kind, both propositions created enormous ill will
and hostility. In the case of Proposition 187, the Republican victory
backfired completely, since it branded them as mean spirited, anti-
immigrant, and antiminority-the latter a bad label to be stuck with in
California-and, increasingly, in the rest of the country. The
propositions were also badly written, so that most of 187 has since
been knocked down by courts. The chief architect of 209, Ward
Connerly, now acknowledges that the abolition of affirmative action
should have been phased in so as to create less of a shock to the
system. Even if one were in favor of both propositions, the manner in
which they were enacted into law was crude and counterproductive. The
centuries-old method of lawmaking by legislature requires debate and
deliberation, takes opposition views into account, crafts compromises,
and thus produces laws that are regarded as legitimate even by people
who disagree with them. Politics did not work well when kings ruled by
fiat and it does not work well when the people do the same.
Perhaps the greatest paradox of the initiative and referendum movement
has been its unexpected relationship to money in politics. Initially
devised to remove public policy from the improper influence of big
business, direct democracy has become an arena in which only the
wealthiest of individuals and interest groups get to play. Like
politicians, successful ballot measures must run for office. First
they need to be packaged, which usually requires political
consultants, focus groups, and a team of lawyers. Then they have to
get on the ballot. To do that they need large numbers of signatures
collected within a relatively short period of time, which almost
always requires the services of professional signature-gathering firms
(referred to only half-jokingly as the "initiative-industrial
complex"). Next they need to be sold to the public, requiring another
enormous expenditure on advertising. As a result, the sums of money
spent promoting and attacking ballot measures rival those spent on the
putatively more corruptible campaigns of legislative candidates. In
his book Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of
Money, David Broder reported that in the 1997-98 legislative cycle,
more than $257 million was spent on initiatives nationwide, which came
to more than a third of the $740 million spent by all of the
candidates for the House and Senate put together. In California, in
1996 alone, more than $141 million was spent on initiatives, which was
33 percent more than was spent by the much-maligned candidates for the
state legislature.
The consequence of large amounts of money entering the initiative
process is depressingly similar to what happens in today's
legislatures: well-organized and well-funded interest groups use the
easy access to protect their turf. For example, when business groups
put "paycheck protection" on the ballots, California unions were able
to circle the wagons and defeat it. So far, teachers unions have been
able to defeat every single school-voucher initiative, including three
well-funded attempts in 2000. In Missouri and Oregon, business
coalitions armed with cash and calling themselves "No Tax Dollars for
Politicians" and "No Taxpayer Handouts for Politicians," respectively,
defeated campaign finance initiatives by large margins. But there is a
wrinkle in this story. While it seems clear that well-funded interest
groups will continue to thrive in the age of direct democracy, the ini-
tiative process has introduced an unexpected player to the political
scene: the billionaire policy-entrepreneur. The financier George
Soros, Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, venture capitalist Timothy
Draper, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and many more have used the
initiative process to promote their pet issues all over the map. In a
sense it is hard to blame them: like everyone else, they have
political views and they are doing what they believe is right. But a
century ago, when the leaders of the Progressive movement were
promoting direct democracy as a way to wrest power from the gilded age
robber-barons, could they ever have imagined a system dominated by
well-entrenched interest groups and politically minded billionaires?
Referendums and initiatives have accelerated the process of taking
power away from politicians and giving it to "the people," but always
through an ever-growing class of professional consultants, lobbyists,
pollsters, and activists. In the name of democracy, we have created a
new layer of enormously powerful elites. And since government has
become a permanent campaign, their work-and influence-never stops.
Those who have lost out as this revolution has proceeded are the
institutions of representative democracy: Congress, politicians, the
political parties, the administrative agencies, government itself. The
new elites also have fewer checks on them than did those before them.
The old party was rooted in a base, a philosophical tradition, and was
visible and accountable-a quasi-public institution. Its officials were
public figures who operated in the open and had to worry about their
reputations. But who monitors the consultants, fundraisers, pollsters,
and lobbyists who now run American politics? By declaring war on
elitism, we have produced politics by a hidden elite, unaccountable,
unresponsive, and often unconcerned with any larger public interest.
The decline of America's traditional elites and institutions-not just
political but cultural, economic, and religious-is at the heart of the
transformation of American society. It is to this story that we turn
next.
The Future of Freedom - Illiberal Democracy at Home & Abroad
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393047644/
Copyright © 2003 by Fareed Zakaria
Zakaria, Fareed.
The future of freedom :
illiberal democracy at home and abroad
Fareed Zakaria.-1st ed.
Includes bibliographical references & index.
ISBN 0-393-04764-4
1. Democracy. 2. Liberty.
3. Political science-Philosophy.
I. Title.
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
www.fareedzakaria.com
