Democracy’s savior?

Vladimir Putin himself at first described his ideal government as “the vertical of power” — a top-down system, with him at the top. But since Western critics accused him of forsaking freedom, Putin now talks about something called “sovereign democracy.” That is, he demonstrates no interest in democracy per se, other than to exploit its trappings (elections, a parliament, news media) as window dressing to legitimize his dictatorship.

• Myanmar has set November 8 as the date of that country’s first free national ballot since 1990. But no matter who wins the most votes, Myanmar’s constitution guarantees 25 percent of the seats in parliament to the military, and the constitution can’t be changed unless more than 75 percent of legislators approve. This isn’t exactly “sovereign democracy” — more like “Catch-22 democracy.”

Chinese paradox

• In keeping with the plans it announced when it reclaimed Hong Kong from Britain in 1997, China has long promised to permit direct elections for Hong Kong’s chief executive by 2017. But under China’s current election proposal, Hong Kong voters would only be able to choose from a list of candidates selected by a largely pro-Beijing nominating committee. You might call this system “Democracy as Long as China Approves of the Results.”
  
• According to Amnesty International, some 120 Chinese human rights lawyers — accounting for virtually all of that country’s entire human-rights bar — have been rounded up across that country this month, along with more than 50 support staffers, relatives, and activists. At the same time, these defenders of the legal rights of ordinary people have been vilified by state media as rabble-rousers seeking “celebrity and money.”
  
• In countries as diverse as Hungary and Egypt, embryonic democracies have lately been smothered in their cribs, ostensibly for the sake of order.

Only a quarter of a century ago, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the world seemed finally to have embraced the robust but messy concept of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. But when the going gets tough — as it often does in the course of human events — desperate people often willingly give up their hard-earned freedoms for the blandishments of a savior on a white horse (or even Donald Trump).

Democracy, it appears, is more fragile than we’d thought. While its enemies have taken the offensive lately, its defenders remain largely silent.

Which brings me, again, to Andrew Jackson.

Historians’ poll

America’s seventh president has been targeted this year by a campaign to remove his image from the $20 bill and replace it with a Native American or an African American or a woman — anyone but (as Gail Collins put it in the New York Times) a “slave-owner who came to national renown as an Indian-killer.” The Times editorial page itself joined the crusade this month, flippantly declaring, “Jackson is in the history books, but there’s no reason to keep him in our wallets.” (Click here.)

Curiously, none of the voices calling for Jackson’s removal has paused to wonder why this manifestly flawed individual was placed on the $20 bill to begin with, or why Americans revered him for more than a century after his death, or why a 1948 poll of prominent American historians ranked Jackson among America’s six “great” presidents, or why a similar 1962 poll ranked him among the “near-great” (albeit still in sixth place).

The answer, I suggested in this space on June 2, lay in Jackson’s pivotal role in implementing popular democracy. “Jackson’s combative demeanor,” I wrote, “emboldened ordinary Americans to assert themselves as citizens instead of subjects deferring to an elite leadership caste.” This “Jacksonian democracy,” I argued, “has driven American dynamism ever since: the notion that ordinary private citizens possess the power to change their world.” (Click here.)

White House invasion

Thomas Jefferson may have laid the intellectual foundations for modern democracy, but Jefferson’s ideal of equality — radical as it may have seemed in 1776 — actually extended the vote only to free white adult male property owners, or about 2 percent of America’s population. Jackson, by contrast, put Jefferson’s ideal into practice: By the time he left the White House in 1837, the property requirement had virtually vanished, so that poor people enjoyed the same voting rights as the rich. That upheaval led, inevitably, to the mass political practices that we take for granted today: popular campaigning techniques, debates, media manipulation by politicians, and the constant need for public officials to engage citizens in the political narrative. It also led, inevitably, to the demise of voting barriers based on race and gender.

The egalitarian principle implied in Jacksonian democracy manifested itself on Old Hickory’s very first day of office, in March 1829, when hundreds of his rustic supporters — frontiersmen, farmers, even women and children — swarmed into the White House after his inauguration ceremony, standing on chairs, breaking china, tearing drapes, and scooping up the cakes, ice cream, and orange punch that had been prepared for Jackson’s reception, until Jackson himself was forced to escape through a window.

A similar spectacle occurred again at Jackson’s funeral in June 1845, when Old Hickory’s wailing slaves elbowed aside the white guests in their laces and top hats, and the general’s pet parrot had to be removed after he let loose a stream of profanity.

Nobody ever said democracy was orderly. As Winston Churchill put it, it’s the worst system of government, except for all the other systems.

Roosevelt’s hero

As a Christmas gift in 2013, Walter Laqueur informs us, Vladimir Putin sent his senior officials and all Russian regional governors a copy of Our Tasks, by Putin’s authoritarian hero Ivan Ilyin. By contrast, in the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt struggled to rescue America’s capitalist/democratic system from the worst economic depression in its history, he sought inspiration from a very different hero. The heritage of Andrew Jackson, FDR noted then, lay in “his unending contribution to the vitality of our democracy. We look back on his amazing personality, we review his battles because the struggles he went through, the enemies he encountered, the defeats he suffered, and the victories he won are part and parcel of our struggles, the enmities, the defeats, and the victories of those who have lived in all the generations that have followed.”

Jackson, wrote his most recent biographer, Jon Meacham, “represents the best of us and the worst of us." His removal from the $20 bill might well be consistent with the dynamic and disruptive democratic process he promoted. But we take Jackson for granted at our peril. Ditto for democracy.