Abstract
The brokers of public opinion in the Western world — its media, popular writers and political activists — propagate an astonishingly complacent conception of democracy and its benevolence. Democracy has been elevated to an almost unchallengeable ideal, woven into a tale of inexorable (if occasionally temporarily reversed) human advance, with the liberal democratic state as the institutional culmination of Western progress. This seemingly naive celebration of the forward march of an idea in fact masks considerable ambivalence in popular sentiment. Many people vote a great deal, and believe that their vote is both an effective action and a moral obligation. But abstention, cynicism and the retreat to cause group politics mark an increasing disenchantment with democratic politics. The past two decades have seen voter dealignment and a growth in anti-party sentiment in all Western states.l Public opinion is structured, internally consistent, persistent over time and sometimes subtle: voters recognize the constraints of political life.2 Yet the recent trend towards unpopular leaders in Western democracies indicates a potential fragility of democracy in its heartlands, even as it is supposedly running triumphant elsewhere.3
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Notes
M. Kaase and K. Newton, Beliefs in Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) vol. 5, chapter 2.
A.M. Butler, ‘Unpopular Leaders: the British Case’, Political Studies 43:1 (1995) 48–65. Protest, however, is usually couched in terms of institutional or, more commonly, personal failure: established political structures are viewed as self-serving, or political leaders are viewed as corrupt. Democracy is being failed, rather than itself failing.
See S.P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
E Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
Following S.M. Lipset, Political Man: the Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961).
See W.R. Keech, Economic Politics: The Costs of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially 211–22.
J. Buchanan and R. Wagner, Democracy in Deficit: the Political Legacy of Lord Keynes (New York: Academic Press, 1977); but see the cautions in M.S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
R.D. Arnold, The Logic of Congressional Action (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
T. Garton Ash, ‘Eastern Europe: the Year of Truth’, New York Review of Books 15 June (1990) 17.
63, cited in G.S. Wood, ‘Democracy and the American Revolution’, in J. Dunn (ed.), Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), 91105, 97. See also T. Ball, Transforming Political Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 59–78.
J.F. Revel, Democracy against Itself.: the Future of the Democratic Impulse, trans. R. Kaplan (New York: Free Press, 1993) viii-ix.
P. Ricoeur, ‘The Political Paradox’, in W. Connolly (ed.), Legitimacy and the State (New York: New York University Press, 1984).
R. Maidment, ‘Democracy in the USA since 1945’, in D. Potter, D. Goldblatt, M. Kiloh and P. Lewis (eds.), Democratization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997) 118.
S. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1980) 391.
B. Hirson, Yours for the Union: Class and community struggles in South Africa 1930–47 (London: Zed Books, 1989) especially chapter 3.
P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel, ‘The Shaping of Apartheid: Contradiction, Continuity and Popular Struggle’, in Bonner, Delius and Posel (eds), Apartheid’s Genesis 1935–62 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993) 34.
H.L.A. Hart and M. Honore, Causation and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956).
See S. Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) on the coexistence of historical inevitability and moral appraisal within Marxist political thought. Lukes isolates the problem by identifying within Marxism a consequentialist perfectionism. On the problem of historical inevitability and human agency in Marxism, see G.A. Cohen, ‘Historical Inevitability and Human Agency’, in Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) 51–82.
See, for example, Greenberg, Race and State see also, J. Cell, the Highest State of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
N. Worden and C. Crais (eds), Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Emancipation in the Nineteenth-century Cape Colony (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993); D. Posel, Making of Apartheid, chapter 9; M. Legassick, ‘British Hegemony and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa, 1900–09’, in W. Beinart and S. Dubow (eds), Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995) 43–59.
J.S. Mill, cited in M. Legassick, ‘British Hegemony and the Origins of Segregation’, in Beinart and Dubow (eds), Segregation and Apartheid 59, 51; source of Mill citation not identified.
J.H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Penguin, 1950) 50.
See W.E. Connolly, ‘Democracy and Territoriality’, in M. Ringrose and A. Lerner (eds), Re-imagining the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 49–75.
See A.M. Butler, Transformative Politics: the Future of Socialism in Western Europe (London: Macmillan, 1995) chapter 2.
Quoted J. Lazar, ‘Verwoerd versus the Visionaries’, in Bonner et al., Apartheid’s Genesis, 372. 72. Dunn, ‘How Democracies Succeed’, 5–18. 73. F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 469. 74. See S.N’Z. Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
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© 1998 Anthony Butler
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Butler, A. (1998). Democracy and Apartheid. In: Democracy and Apartheid. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374607_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374607_4
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