THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502160339
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEREMIAH J.A. CRONIN
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY
PATRICK E. KENNON
Doubleday. 308 pp. $24.
IN THIS ERA of calls to arms by politicos of the right and left against the ``evil bureaucracy,'' The Twilight of Democracy by Patrick Kennon provides thoughtful analysis of why bureaucracy is necessary and why the ``caveman'' mentality of the political sector is more likely than not to lead a nation into ruin.
According to Kennon, ``Those societies that continue to allow themselves to be administered by individuals whose only qualification is that they were able to win a popularity contest will go from failure to failure and eventually pass from the scene.''
Kennon, who retired from the CIA after 25 years of service, believes that democracy is not necessarily the most beneficial or the most efficient form of government and that it is largely irrelevant to the successful functioning of a society.
He makes a clear distinction between the ``democratic'' ideals of the revolutionaries who formed this country in 1776, and those of their equally ``democratic'' counterparts who started the French blood bath of 1789. In both cases, the leaders of the rebellions ended up with democratic government, i.e., mass rule.
The American version of democracy was based upon the principle that government is best limited in power lest it infringe upon individual freedoms. The civilization that resulted from this, Kennon points out, was incapable of bringing the new country into the ``first world'' until an efficient bureaucracy was created at the end of the 19th century.
The French principle, on the other hand, espoused that government is the most appropriate mechanism for enforcing purity of individual thought to create a just society. The resulting civilization was one that literally killed or drove away the private sector and produced instability, and was eventually replaced by the more-orderly Napoleonic civilization.
Kennon describes nations in terms of the relative balance among political, private and bureaucratic sectors of their societies. He defines membership in the ``first,'' ``second'' or ``third'' worlds by how these sectors interrelate. In the first world, the private sector and the bureaucracy are foremost. The bureaucracy provides the efficient structures by which the private sector can prosper. These include stable currencies, regulation of the marketplace and common infrastructure such as transportation systems. Without these structures, the nation can't flourish.
In the second world, the political and the bureaucratic sectors are prominent. The bureaucracy, whether civil or military, is used to enforce the government's plan for the nation. Centrally mandated goals can be ideological, as in North Korea or Cuba, or economic, as in South Korea or Taiwan.
The private and political sectors dominate in the third world. What passes for bureaucracy is controlled by systems of favor or graft.
Kennon sees the wave of the future in terms of a first-world nation that has a highly expert bureaucracy supervised generally by representatives of the population. These representatives would probably be chosen at random, and their political job would be to safeguard freedom while not getting in the way of efficiency. Such a bureaucracy would tie in with an international bureaucracy that would ensure that certain standards of economic and political conduct were observed. Kennon describes this as a sort of empire, with the first world at the core and the second and third worlds constituting the periphery. Those second- and third-world countries that eventually achieved the behavior and economic standards of the first would be invited into the fold. Otherwise, they would be allowed to observe their tribal and police-state ways, provided that they do not engage in behaviors reprehensible to the first world, such as genocide or transborder aggression.
In Kennon's view, the United States should not follow the lead of politicians who want to dismantle the regulatory systems of the executive branch and let the magical ``free market'' bring about what is right and good. He believes that would be a ticket to membership in the third world because an unregulated private sector will maximize its efforts for short-term profit, civilization's needs be damned.
But while chiding Jeffersonian democracy for its belief that the aggregate votes of individuals acting in their own self-interest will produce the best government, he seems to believe that bureaucracies, unfettered by extraneous political ideologies, can efficiently achieve the goals of society. He does not advance a mechanism for how society sets these goals, however. Historically, such forces have come from politicians driven by the desire to stay in power or from nations or tribes bent on gaining advantage over another in a competition for resources.
Like any other organization that does not have external forces forcing it to modify, learn and grow stronger, a bureaucracy will ossify and seek to maintain the known and comfortable. One need only examine the public assistance programs of the United States and Great Britain to see how well-meaning bureaucracies have produced results that few consider to be advancing a common good.
Kennon provides an excellent defense of bureaucracy, but fails to come up with a viable alternative to democracy for setting societal goals and maintaining freedom. MEMO: Jeremiah J.A. Cronin is an environmental consultant who lives in
Norfolk. by CNB