Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane has always been of the view that “democracy” must be extraordinarily limited. It should be a device for removing highly objectionable people from national offices like that of the President, but not much more.
As Crane explained it long ago in Forbes, Americans should go to bed early on election night. That’s because the less we have reason to care about or know about who occupies the White House, the much better off we all are. Legislation should largely be state and city local so that individuals can choose their policy bliss, including taxes and spending.
Crane’s insights into democracy’s myriad demerits, along with Cato senior fellow Roger Pilon's own skepticism, came to mind early and often while reading Washington Post editorial page columnist Shadi Hamid’s 2022 book The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. Hamid’s thorough, and multipartisan look at the merits and demerits of democracy was an informative and at times fascinating read despite occasional disagreements with the author.
About the good or bad of democracy, Hamid is clear about his mixed, and constantly evolving feelings. The bet here is that in 2025 he’s of a different mind than he was upon publication in 2022. That’s how it should be if people are constantly learning.
For now, what Hamid is sure of is that for the typical citizen of a small d democratic country, or for the promoter of same elsewhere, a country in which the leaders and policy are an effect of the counting of heads “tends to deliver profound disappointment in voters’ ‘lived experience.’” Which isn’t surprising.
It arguably helps explain discontent in the U.S. right now. There’s quite simply way too much democracy. That’s why people are up so late on election night.
Whether or not Hamid agrees even partially, it’s hard to say. Again, his views are clearly evolving. Which is a compliment.
Hamid writes that the “ability or willingness to be unhappy but still obliging when one’s adversary wins an election is the precondition of democracy as we know it.” It might make sense at first glance, but the crucial reply is that not all democracies are equal. If readers are doubtful, they need only list not just the President of the United States, but also the President of Switzerland.
Which is the point libertarians frequently made after 2016’s election, and to this day: no doubt many people disliked Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or both in 2016, but what they unwittingly despised was and is the excessive power installed in a presidency that was never supposed to be this strong or consequential. Presidents shouldn’t matter very much.
Hamid sees democracy in its more ideal form as a situation in which “the other party is still merely an opponent, not an enemy.” He asserts based on the previous metric that “today, the United States no longer meets this prerequisite of democracy.” There’s no major argument with Hamid’s pessimism, but there is some uncertainty as to why Hamid thinks things are as they are.
The argument in my 2019 book They’re Both Wrong was a variation of the libertarian view expressed about Trump vs. Clinton in 2016. While Hamid would likely admit in a sheepish moment that hatred in U.S. politics is as old as the United States, and that the memories of collegiality among U.S. politicians mask the real truth about enormous amounts of vitriol, the not-discussed-enough explanation for the political divide can be found in too much policy being made in Washington, the latter an effect of too much democracy. Opposite Crane’s vision of early-to-bed election nights, people are once again staying up late. And they’re staying up late because national politicians have too much power to create too much policy.
Which brings up the first quibble with Hamid. Channeling the partisan divide that he deems magnified in the present, Hamid laments how “a growing number of Americans do not seem willing to respect democratic outcomes that go against their wishes. While this tendency is most pronounced among Republicans [emphasis mine], it goes further and deeper.” Which is the author overstating things a bit.
Without defending a Republican voter, pundit and political class that is increasingly unrecognizable, the mere suggestion that it’s generally Republicans unwilling to respect democratic outcomes isn’t serious. Just look at the 21st century alone.
Was it George W. Bush (the worst president in my lifetime, by far) who waited over a month to accept the election results in 2000, was Stacey Abrams a closet Republican all along, and what about Hillary Clinton’s unwillingness to not just concede on election night in 2016, but in the years that followed as Democratic pundits and politicians alike promoted a stolen-by-Russians narrative that insulted stupid so at odds was it with reality. When a lost laptop threatened Joe Biden’s electoral chances in 2020, the Democrats went the Russian route again, not to mention their total trampling on the so-called “will of the people” when the powers-that-be shuffled Biden aside in 2024 so that they could foist Kamala Harris on voters… And that’s just a few of the many examples of the sad truth that too much democracy has Republicans and Democrats too invested in national elections that theoretically shouldn’t matter a whole lot.
The main thing is that the unwillingness of Republicans and Democrats to accept electoral outcomes speaks to the problem of democracy when democracy gets out of hand. Alas, Hamid’s book isn’t so much about democracy as practiced in the U.S. as it’s about the willingness of Americans to accept democratic outcomes outside the U.S., the Middle East in particular. In his words, The Problem of Democracy is about “the cost of democracy producing ‘bad’ outcomes, and whether it is a cost Americans should be willing to bear.”
Thought of another way, American political types like democracy in other countries when the voters get it "right," but only then. In Hamid’s words, “democracy might be nice,” but historically “it simply wasn’t worth the trouble when its results were so uncertain and its participants so unreliable.”
All of which brings up the oddity of what George W. Bush tried to bring about after 9/11. The tragedy correctly or incorrectly confirmed in many ways the crazed nature of the people in Islamic countries not just in the eyes of U.S. voters, but also politicians on both sides of the aisle. Yet despite this consensus, the expressed reason for the subsequent warring was to bring “democracy” to the Middle East. The Founders had to be spinning. Going to the other side of the world to waste precious blood and treasure on democracy? Forget about what we had to learn the hard way once again about the best laid battle plans and all that, and just stop and think about the democracy angle.
Hamid did then, and is now. Though he’s clear early on that “the fear of a democracy undone by Islamists has been as persistent as it is speculative,” he describes as “emphatic” his desire to not live under a democratically elected Islamist government. He indicates that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has similar fear then and now “of a democracy undone by Islamists.” As in, “we want democracy in theory but not necessarily want its outcomes in practice.” Which is seemingly Hamid’s way of pointing out that Americans are situational about democracy. They want it so long as voters once again get things “right.” He makes a fair point, but seemingly implies with it a racial, anti-Islamic religion angle to American skepticism about democracy that leaves out the much more practical, centuries old way of looking askance at democracy.
It speaks to a way in which Hamid arguably erred in writing his book. Since he wrote it with evident openness to ideas from both sides, it’s too bad he didn’t open the discussion a little bit more to people like Crane, Pilon, and other small l libertarians from organizations like Cato. See the previous paragraph to get the meaning of the previous sentence.
What Crane and Pilon could have articulated to Hamid is that fear of democracy is not fear of how people who don’t look like us will vote, or how people allegedly radicalized by Islamism will vote, it’s a fear of majorities in general. In the case of the Founders, their worry was about the passions of people from Europe who frequently shared their religion and who looked like them. Without presuming to speak for Pilon, that’s at least apparently why they wrote the Constitution as they did. Aware of the dangers inherent in majoritarianism, they would write a document meant to severely limit it. A document that didn’t limit the rights of the people, but that instead would limit the rights of a national government that derived its highly limited powers explicity from the people.
This way most of the taxing and governing would be local. Yes, keep the fights local, but even then the individuals making and voting for policy locally would enjoy enormously broad freedoms because they were born – yes – free, but also because tyranny and mob rule don’t gain nobility just because they’re practiced locally. Quoting Pilon directly from a piece written at National Review in 2003:
“The Founders didn’t throw off a king only to enable a majority to do what no king would ever dare. No, they instituted a plan whereby in “wide areas,” individuals would be entitled to be free simply because they were born so entitled — while in “some” areas, majorities would be entitled to rule not because they were inherently so entitled, but because they were constitutionally authorized to rule. That gets the order right: individual liberty first; and self‐government second, as a means toward securing that liberty.”
Hamid doesn’t ignore thinking like Pilon’s in total in the book, but voices like Pilon’s aren’t as evident. To read Hamid is to feel that the debate in the book and that continues to run through his own head would have been improved by these thinkers.
That’s because at least as far as democratic outcomes go, the son of well-born Egyptian immigrants in Hamid seems to share the skepticism of his fellow Americans in the foreign policy establishment who unfortunately do see democracy as good for some, but bad for the "wrong" kind of people and religions. He’s asking, “Is democracy worth it when it increasingly produces what seem to be destructive outcomes that put lives and livelihoods at risk?” The view here is that Hamid is in some ways asking the wrong question by making it a question.
To see why, consider a point he makes deeper into the book, that there’s no such thing as a “benevolent dictator.” No there isn’t, because as Hamid himself explains it, “domination is intrinsic to dictatorial rule.” From the individual who arrogates to himself dictatorial power it’s easier to see the problems inherent in small d democratic power. The same domination is at work. As Hamid writes later in the book, he has “no knowledge” of a democracy even on a small island where the people “agree on all the big questions and most of the small ones.” Well, of course they don’t. And the manifestation of the truth that we’re all different while seeing things differently is that Americans once again stay up late on election night. The desire among winners, or the mob, to dictate, is intoxicating. And it’s happening. No, democracy without strict limits is not worth it because as Hamid articulates so well, there's no such thing as a "benevolent dictator."
Bringing it back to U.S. and its desire to project democracy globally, part of the problem as Hamid sees it is the hypocrisy at work. He notes that George W. Bush and his crowd loved democracy, "the will of the people" and all that, until they didn’t. Subsequently, they backtracked on democracy in the Middle East after Islamist parties made significant inroads in Egypt, Lebanon and Bahrain. But to be fair, Hamid wasn’t taking sides here. He quotes Barack Obama as saying, “All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats.” Hamid read this as Obama giving up on the Muslims to be peaceful. Whatever the answer, a lack of trust about the ability of Middle Eastern countries to govern themselves isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing.
Hamid goes on to write that “My argument in this book is that the entire American paradigm, and not simply part of it, has been faulty in its starting premises, and so the resulting policies are built on a broken edifice.” True, but has Hamid happened upon why the premises are wrong? The view here is that he hasn’t. The problem with the so-called “American paradigm” isn’t hypocrisy, it’s the paradigm itself. Put more bluntly, government intervention that never works stateside hardly becomes brilliant overseas. Which means the problem is in the conceit that the United States can improve the world. It can’t. See the myriad of government initiatives here over the decades. To name but one, how did “The War on Poverty” work out? Medicare began as a $3 billion program, it’s on the verge of $1 trillion in annual expenditures, so this must mean all Americans have abundant healthcare?
The problem is that Hamid has an interventionist side. He writes that “doing nothing” is “not a neutral posture,” or it’s not a non-policy since when “we do less,” they “do more.” It’s true, but that’s the point. We need the people in cities, states and countries to do more for themselves, wholly free from those who want to bring “democracy” or “smart autocrats” to their countries. Intervention is invariably fatal because it's a horrid conceit.
Hamid quotes General James Mattis as wondering, “Is political Islam in the best interest of the United States?” Mattis goes on to “suggest that the answer is no,” but as with Hamid asking if democracy is worth it, Mattis is asking the wrong question when he muses about whether “political Islam” is in the U.S.’s best interests. There’s no way of knowing. If there were, newspapers could be written months and years in advance, and markets would be fully priced. Rather than engaging in the obnoxious, nation-enervating conceit that we can fix other nations, the better approach would be to simply allow countries to succeed and fail.
Yes, the above is a recession metaphor. Why did the Great Depression last so long? It did because the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations routinely intervened in the healthy corrections that markets were trying to bring about. The problem was that in fighting markets in the way that foreign policy types fight democracy, strongmen, and in between, the U.S. foreign policy establishment robs countries of the essential cleansing and recovery that can only be preceded by allotment of failure.
Hamid asserts that while “emphatic” about not wanting to be ruled by a democratically elected Islamist government, he’s also of the mind that “Islam itself is not the problem.” There’s no disagreeing with him there. Sorry, but the people are the marketplace, including their arrival at or embrace of religion. What holds countries back is the endless intervention that fails everywhere it’s tried. Yes, countries need less policy including less foreign policy.
Interesting here is Hamid reporting that in Iraq, Lebanon, and Tunisia, “significant parts of the population long for strongmen as an antidote to ineffectiveness, gridlock, and endemic corruption.” Hamid’s retort is that bad as democratic governments can be, authoritarian regimes “are only good at responding to crises when they’re good,” but when they’re not, “which is most of the time – there is no obvious way to correct course.” That’s true, but it’s also true about democracies. That’s why freedom works so well. There’s no good or bad authoritarian, just as there’s no good or bad powerful democracy, there’s just government error in each interspersed with the policy edition of the truth about stopped clocks being correct twice a day.
Hamid points to Singapore’s authoritarian in Lee Kuan Yew as evidence of a “benevolent autocrat,” but the more likely truth was that Yew could be an authoritarian precisely because he didn’t need to be. As John Stuart Mill made plain, the most corrupt societies have the most rules. Singaporeans didn't need rules such that in many ways, Yew was superfluous.
Which brings us to a brief detour into our own authoritarianism stateside, as in what happened in the spring of 2020. This was where it seemed Hamid really stumbled. A fifth of the way through the book he wrote that “The largest Western democracies, as well as some of the smallest like Belgium, were among the world’s leaders in per-capita deaths from COVID-19.” A comment like that, one pregnant with insinuation, naturally caught my eye as an author of a book about the tragic global response to the coronavirus, When Politicians Panicked.
I’ll lead with what should be obvious: the more lethal the presumed virus, the less necessary the governmental response, if any. Really, who among us needs to be forced to avoid sickness or death? It rates asking given Hamid’s evident insinuation that too much freedom resulted in excess deaths; that authoritarian regimes are able to force compassionate outcomes on their people in the way that nominally free countries cannot. Nonsense.
It had me wanting to ask Hamid if he was close to anyone who died directly from the virus. I kept asking it while writing When Politicians Panicked, a book that footnoted the New York Times more often than any other source. You see, underlying all the alarmism on the front page of the Times was honesty about who was really getting sick from, and on the rarest of rare occasions dying with the virus as opposed to dying from the virus. These truths could always be found deeper in the newspaper: that the virus’s lethality was almost totally confined to a tiny percentage of very old Americans; nursing homes the routine locale of deaths once again with the virus. Ultimately the Times brought the truth to its front page in December of 2021, “COVID HAS KILLED ONE OF EVERY 100 OLDER AMERICANS.”
About the headline, it’s not meant to minimize death, or old people, but it is to ask who Hamid was reading during the lockdowns and beyond? More important, how did he conclude from what transpired that it was the dying that caused “a growing number of Americans and Europeans to doubt not only their politicians but their own political systems.” More realistically, the doubt that continues to this day is an effect of how badly politicians panicked in ways that were not just bad for well-to-do Americans and Europeans, but monstrously so for the world’s poorest. It raises another question: in addition to wondering how many people Hamid knew who died from the virus, how many politicians can he list who still brag about imposing lockdowns in 2020?
So, while the Cato Institute sadly and shamefully sat out the lockdowns, all the while hiding beyond a "wait and see" approach to the science that U.S. and global politicians were in no way hemmed in by, it should be said yet again that Hamid would have profited in his analysis of the coronavirus episode from a broader range of inputs. Libertarians would have told him what's true, that individual freedom is most important when an unknown like a virus is spreading. Freedom is how knowledge is created. Millions, and in our case, hundreds of millions of individual choices made by individuals and businesses informing us about what, and what not to do in response to the spread of a novel virus. The one-size-fits-all lockdown approach didn't protect us, rather it blinded us.
As for “democracies” being where most of the deaths occurred, let’s be serious. This wasn’t an effect of too much freedom, rather it was an effect of a virus so meek that it infected everyone (the mass infection a certain sign of its meek qualities), and since everyone dies eventually, lots of people were going to die with the virus.
With each discussion and example in Hamid’s book, it was hard not to return as the reader to a belief that Hamid himself seemed reluctant to embrace or accept: democracy is authoritarianism. Say it repeatedly. That’s why it was so puzzling when he wrote that “democracy allows for the peaceful transfer of power.” That’s true in theory, but not nearly as true in practice precisely because majoritarianism logically can’t be about the peaceful transfer of power when so many important decisions are being made by majorities. Quoting Henry Kissinger about the U.S. removing Allende from power in Chile, “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” Kissinger was mistaking the problem. It was too much democracy, with Allende the symptom of it.
That’s once again why the Founders wrote the Constitution as they did. It was all about restraining majorities, though as evidenced by an every four-year refrain that “this is the most important election in our lifetime,” the Founders surely failed in making their founding document airtight. In other words, liberty yielded to governments of men and women elected by men and women, and here we are. Great for sure, but Oh My what could be!
Hamid seeks some form of “democratic minimalism” where voters “have a say in the laws and decisions that shape your own life.” He might agree in a light moment that the “minimalism” part is a platitude. What’s not is his expressed preference for “majorities or pluralities” over “liberalism, which prioritizes individual freedom.” Ok, but for the problem that there’s no getting a little pregnant with democracy. What’s limited must be kept limited lest we get to where we are in the U.S. today. And Hamid is not a fan of today. No doubt we’re still spectacular as just alluded to, no doubt we’re in many ways the envy of the world, but the “unseen” with the United States is staggering. Again, what could we be if we’d not allowed democracy to get out of hand?
Notable about the U.S. trying to bring democracy to the Middle East is what the Israelis thought. Hamid quotes long-time Republican foreign policy eminence Eliot Abrams as saying that “it was mockery behind our backs” when Bush and his team explained their plans for the Middle East through the prism of democracy. Along these lines, another source for Hamid’s book indicates that after the 2013 military coup in Egypt, “AIPAC was the best lobbyist for the Egyptian government you could ever imagine.” They all like strongmen, it seems.
For now, it’s arguably useful to address the elephant in the room: would Hamid have written The Problem of Democracy with an accent on the Middle East if the region were bereft of oil? Hopefully the question answers itself.
What’s frustrating, however, about contemplating the question is how economically clueless the whole foreign policy establishment is. The simple, economic truth is that the United States could be 100% bereft of oil, at war with or embargoed by every oil-producing nation on earth, yet it would still consume abundant Middle Eastern oil as though it had bubbled up in West Texas. That’s because there’s no getting around the economic fact of life that there’s no accounting for the final destination of any good.
Short of Middle Eastern countries literally sitting on their oil, something they’re not going to do, they’ll be trading with us. Always and everywhere. This requires mention as a plea for the U.S. to once again get out of the Middle East so that its countries can succeed or fail on their own, the failure in any country the source of rebirth so long as allegedly “benevolent” governments don’t intervene in the failure. It’s a long way of saying that speculation stateside on the right form of government for other countries, and even more foolhardy, the right form of government for other countries vis-à-vis the U.S., is bad for us AND the countries whose futures we’re intervening in. Since people are different, so are governments different. Let people choose.
Realistically the only foreign policy stance the U.S. should have is not just openness to foreign production, but also openness to the people in countries who want to get out. Immigration isn’t a popular word now, but it’s the purest market signal of all exactly because it signals the movement of the world’s foremost capital (human) to its highest use. What a deal to offer the world: we won’t meddle in your affairs, but we’ll provide asylum for people eager to escape what is dangerous, dysfunctional, or both. The cost savings would be enormous. Alas, it’s not happening.
Hamid is clear that something else of importance is similarly not happening, the end of religion in the Middle East. As he puts it, “religion isn’t going anywhere in the Middle East.” Which means there’s nothing much the United States can do other than at long last removing its burdensome self from a situation that it can’t fix, but that in trying to fix, is yet again delaying the necessary failures and economic corrections that will position countries in the region to start over based on getting real in the first place.
What’s interesting is that some in the Middle East, and probably many more than Americans are aware of, grasp the above assertion about what not only the Middle East needs, but every country reliant on American money, military protection, advice, or all three needs. Hamid quotes a Muslim Brotherhood type asking Hamid “why would the West help Egypt become a powerful country, so that Egypt becomes independent and not needing the U.S.?” The right question, and one that bears asking repeatedly. Public choice theory at work. We all want to perpetuate our employment and foreign policy figures are no different. Since billions annually flow from the U.S. to the Middle East, jobs aplenty spring from this. That won’t be the case if Egypt and others are allowed to experience the failure without which there won’t be success.
Of interest to readers who would expect lots of negativity about Donald Trump coming from a Brookings Institution, Washington Post columnist, they might be surprised. Without assuming Hamid a fan of Trump, he’s not critical while frequently laudatory. Eager for a rethinking of U.S. foreign policy, Hamid indicates that “the Trump administration helped make this rethinking of U.S. policy possible.” He adds that “For the first time, at least in my adult life, there is real room for ideas that would have previously been dismissed as ‘radical,’ or wishful thinking, or both.”
Mostly it seemed that he found Trump’s honesty appealing. Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal has said the same before. In some ways Trump is the most honest president we’ve had in a long time. In Hamid’s words, “Under Trump, the U.S. was less hypocritical than it was under previous administrations.” He writes the latter while saying the lack of hypocrisy “does not necessarily produce better outcomes,” but that overall “there was something refreshing, for instance, about Trump’s complete disinterest in American support for human rights and democracy abroad.”
Hamid is not as reverent of Obama, though it’s easy to conclude that his disappointment was rooted in high expectations for #44, and bottomless expectations for #45? Whatever the answer, he writes that “the Obama years proved devastating - in a way they weren’t with Trump or George W. Bush – for anyone holding out hope for a different approach to the Middle East.”
Which in some ways made Trump and Obama the foreign policy heroes of the book. Whether it’s indifference or impressive rationality hidden behind the bluster, Trump’s instinct has largely been to avoid trying to fix the world. In Obama’s case, his foreign policy was “don’t do stupid shit.” Precisely. Intervention in foreign countries, along with muscular military responses meant to not give the impression of weakness, are invariably stupid.
Hamid is disappointed that Obama didn’t embrace his lofty campaign rhetoric of the kind which said “If history is to bend, someone must bend it.” Good for Obama. The best foreign policy of all, other than fully open trade no matter what other countries do, is not doing anything. Because when governments do, it’s invariably stupid shit. Hamid’s book isn't stupid. It’s quite good and interesting, and it will make people of all stripes think.
