He sure the heck does. In his stunningly prescient 1997 essay, Has Democracy a Future? (Foreign Affairs—may be behind a paywall), bow-tied, martini-sippin’ Artie,1 whom I frequently dismissed as the jerkiest of knee-jerk liberals, essentially writes the future as us young folks have lived it in the 21st century. The Arthur Schlesinger I read always struck me as a bit of a cock-eyed optimist, viewing history as a record of humanity on the march, drawing a straight line from the Sermon on the Mount to the New Deal, when, so it seemed, there wasn’t any problem a bunch of Harvard professors couldn’t solve.
Well, if that picture of Artie was ever accurate, by 1997 his picture of the world had changed radically. The “New Artie” sees the victories of democracy that occurred under the aegis of the seemingly all-mighty FDR as being quite possibly the gifts of fortune rather than inevitable triumphs.
The political, economic, and moral failures of democracy [World War I and the Great Depression] had handed the initiative to totalitarianism. Something like this could happen again. If liberal democracy fails in the 21st century, as it failed in the twentieth, to construct a humane, prosperous, and peaceful world, it will invite the rise of alternative creeds apt to be based, like fascism and communism, on flight from freedom and surrender to authority.
Uh, isn’t that happening? Artie puts his finger on the fact that—contrary (again) to what I would have expected of him—democracy isn’t “natural”. Instead, it’s the product of two related but contingent forces:
Modern democracy itself is the political offspring of technology and capitalism,2 the two most dynamic—that is to say, destabilizing—forces loose in the world today. Both are driven ever onward by self-generated momentum that strains the bonds of social control and of political sovereignty.
Because he lived a long time (b. 1917, d. 2007), Schlesinger had ample time to see his “youthful” illusions regarding the natural leadership role of the Democratic Party shattered by such things as the Johnson Administration’s catastrophic extension of U.S. intervention in Vietnam,3 the furiously irrational “New Left” revolt against New Deal moderation, and the great triumphs, both domestic and foreign, of the Reagan Administration. But, surprisingly, there is very little bitterness or carping extant in this piece. What there is is startling prescience, both with regard to the computer revolution and its impact on the economy and democracy—even though Schlesinger was writing at the very beginning of the Internet—and the emergence of a truly global economy:
While the onrush of technology creates new substantive problems and promises to revise the political system through which we deal with them, the onrush of capitalism may have even more disruptive consequences. Let us understand the relationship between capitalism and democracy. Democracy is impossible without private ownership because private property—resources beyond the arbitrary reach of the state—provides the only secure basis for political opposition and intellectual freedom. But the capitalist market is no guarantee of democracy, as Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew, Pinochet, and Franco, not to mention Hitler and Mussolini, have amply demonstrated. Democracy requires capitalism, but capitalism does not require democracy, at least in the short run.
Well, I could go on, but there’s little point. Artie called the turn with astonishing accuracy, predicting the massive social disruptions created by new technologies reshaping and supercharging a truly global economy, shifting political and economy power to the knowledge workers within individual nations, reducing the power of individual nations to control their own economic destinies, and ultimately shifting power away from the West, where it has largely resided for the past two or three centuries. So check Artie out!
1. In a memoir, probably written sometime in the eighties, Artie sighed that young folks, with all their fancy wines, would never know the joys of “real alcohol”—the all-mighty martini.
2. Since it’s irrelevant to his argument, Artie doesn’t make the point that I would make, and have made, that both “technology” (i.e., western science) and capitalism, though in their contemporary forms irresistible, are also not “natural”—are the result of a “perfect storm” of factors—the geographic location of Europe, its divided polities, its phonetic alphabet, the invention of the printing press and the telescope, the Protestant Reformation, and the importation of “Arabic” numerals, just for starters—that could have easily never come together, leaving “civilization” all around the world pretty much as it was circa 1400, dominated by static landowning elites, with not the slightest prospect for “change”, much less “progress”.
3. To a very great extent, Johnson simply followed the policy of insensible “mission creep” established by President Kennedy, never willing to acknowledge that such steps make any outcome other than “victory” politically unacceptable. In off the record conversations, former President Eisenhower constantly urged an aggressive policy in Vietnam, and Johnson, desperate both for Eisenhower’s approval and desperate to believe that Eisenhower had all the answers, found it very easy to listen to him.
What specifically were the triumphs of Reagan?
Reducing inflation, restoring economic growth, and bringing an end to the Cold War.