Democracy without political virtue

“The finance minister in a Third World country should have the ability to present his annual budget as a package that cannot be amended, only approved or denied as a whole …. so that when a political crisis triggers the fall of the government it does not automatically result in the collapse of the economic reform” (Fareed Zakaria 2007 – “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad” WW Norton).

The above should sound familiar, for it is similar to the judicial contention at the heart of the current budget quarrel that is taking place between the executive, parliament and the judiciary. The inappropriateness of the above recommendation for Guyana is obvious but aspects of the discourse in which it is contained are sufficiently interesting to momentarily hold our attention.

If I understand Zakaria correctly, he holds that there has been a pernicious development in which democracy has been trumping liberty even in developed Western liberal societies, and the purpose of the quotation above is to help to mitigate the effect of this process in underdeveloped illiberal societies.

Zakaria claims that liberalism emphasizes individual liberty and places the rule of law at the centre of politics.