# Posted 10:44 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

IS DEMOCRACY PERFECT? No, of course not. Nor are the New York Yankees, but they just keep on winning and winning and winning. And, if politics were baseball, democracy would be the New York Yankees. And democracy would've won the last 20 World Series in a row, not just 5 of the last 10.

(I tempted to say that Communism would be the Red Sox, but that's an insult to Communism since it gave the Yankees more of a challenge than the Red Sox ever did.)

So, you might ask, why I am going on at length with this random analogy? First of all, because it's fun, and I've been feeling a little too serious lately. Said analogy is also a very indirect reply to John Coumarianos, who infers from my recent mention of Tocqueville that I am unwilling to admit that democracy has its flaws.

As I see it, John just can't tear himself away from a certain nostalgic attachment to era of Marie Antoinette. He writes that

However unjust aristocracy was, it never risked demagoguery because popular consent is not the ticket to rule in that kind of regime. Leaders or statesmen in aristocracies are more self-confident, more free to say what they think, and less apt to flatter.

Whoa there. Wasn't flattery often the essence of court politics? Think Louis XIV. Now old Louis certainly was confident -- as were many of royal colleagues -- but often to the point of demanding that their every whim become state policy.

As for demagoguery, what about Bismarck? Yes, Bismarck. He kept the German people in line almost entirely through demagoguery. When he wasn't just having his opponents (mainly Catholics and socialists) beaten and imprisoned, that is.

Now, you might say Bismarck is not the best example because the Second Reich was a mixed regime, sort of a semi-electoral military dictatorship. But I think the point is a general one: in the absence of elections, the ruling class often finds itself in permanent crisis, struggling to win the consent of downtrodden subjects who have little love lost for the government.

Now what about John's point that one of democracy's most noticeable defects

is the lack of training or educating a political class, including inattention to the ambition and desire to rule among potential leaders.

Frankly, I'm not persuaded that autocratic states ever did much in the way of educating a truly competent political class. The real exception to that rule seems to have been Imperial China, not any of the European aristocracies that John is thinking of. As I see it, no state has ever produced a leadership class to match the United States' scientists, cabinet secretaries, entrepreneurs, generals, scholars and (perhaps) artists.

And why (other than having such a large population) has the US been able to produce constantly such outstanding inviduals in all of these categories? Because the meritocratic order taps the vast potential inhrent in that great unwashed mass once consigned to irrelevance by the old aristocracies.

Now, let me throw out a provocative idea to end this post with: One of the most important distinctions between neo- and paleo-cons is that the neo-cons have liberated themselves from the unjustiable nostalgia that leads paleo-cons to idealize the past.

While conservatism is often associated with an attachment to the past or a suspicion of change, neo-conservatives buck that trend and win their conservative stripes by making an unflinching commitment to a traditional set of core values -- traditional in the sense that they have hardly changed at all since being articulated by great thinkers such as John Locke and James Madison.

As Louis Hartz memorably observed, American radicals are fundamentally conservative and vice versa, thus producing a remarkable degree of stability and consensus in the American body politic. While I don't identify myself as a neo-conservative or a conservative at all, I have much greater respect for a conservatism built on a foundation of values than one built on the quicksand of a nostalgic attachment to the ever-changing past.

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