In July, Working Policy published an article by Kirill Buketov on the fundamental rules of democracy for the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. In it, he presented his own view on the unlearned lessons of the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution in connection with the unsuccessful experience of developing democracy in countries of the former USSR, which appear after 35 years far from the tasks declared back then.

In this article, Vasily Zharikov supplements the previous material with arguments relevant to modern political theory. This should allow us to better understand not only the reasons for the failures of democracy in a specific region of the world, but also to think about current global challenges.

It is no secret that four decades after the start of democratization in the USSR, old-fashioned liberal democracy encountered serious problems almost everywhere and primarily in the United States itself. Therefore, in fighting for democratic values and its future, we must look for universal causes of the current situation and equally universal means to fix them. In this regard, the lessons of Eastern Europe may turn out to be no less important and instructive for North America and the West as a whole.

An Apology for Equality

Let's start with the foundation. The Philadelphia Declaration of July 4, 1776 proclaimed the independence of the North American states not as a "highest value and end in itself," but as an "instrument to achieve more important goals – freedom, human rights, and human dignity." This thought is absolutely just. However, we should pay more attention to another important component of democratic order – equality.

Equality is not just a declared abstract entity, but the fundamental basis of democracy. And if the moderate liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr. viewed all American history as a constant clash and struggle between the principles of freedom and equality, then his younger and more left-leaning colleague from Princeton University, Jan-Werner Müller, considers freedom and equality two non-contradictory and equally significant prerequisites for democracy. In political terms, this means that democracy implies equal access for citizens to discuss and shape their country's course.

No matter how idealistic this may sound nowadays, freedom is impossible without equality. And in this regard, the US indeed served as an example for the Old World and the entire world for a long time. It is no surprise that Alexis de Tocqueville was amazed that communication between people in America depended much less on their social status than in Europe. There, everyone had an equal right to their judgments on politics and anything else at all, whereas in France even after all its revolutions, the right to speak depended much more on the speaker's position in society.

To say nothing of the Soviet Union, whose culture Alexander Kochev considered a simplified analogue of the French one, adapted for a 12-year-old child. Under the banner of total egalitarianism, there was hidden a strict division of society into many floors of the nomenclature hierarchy, where children of ordinary engineers were not given the same as children of "engineers of human souls." The right to speak publicly belonged to few who had passed through the sieve of the district committee, the first department, and the chief editor. At the same time, the speaker always remembered how they obtained their right to speak publicly. No one in that system believed that it belonged to every person from birth.

The situation with equality at the end of the 1980s in the USSR was in some ways even worse than in the Russian Empire a century earlier. If the old Russian intelligentsia perceived existing cruel inequality as a reason for their own "sense of guilt" before the people, then Soviet intellectuals simply indulged in their privileged status directly dependent on proximity to one or another special distributor of food and household goods. Then, this environment established a fashion for contempt and fear of the people, which found expression in a meme quote from a slave-owning writer of the early 19th century: "God forbid to see a Russian uprising, senseless and merciless." In particular, with these words, Soviet liberals in 1989 responded to calls to support the beginning wave of workers' strikes. Preserving and expanding their own privileges under the guise of fighting for the benefits of higher nomenclature turned out to be more important for these people than the common good.

I will allow myself one more small example of how far late Soviet and post-Soviet reality is from basic democratic principles. How are political parties created in Russia? It does not matter whether they are pro-government or opposition; the method is almost always the same: the presidium invites everyone else to the main hall as extras. In this presidium sit the future chairman and co-chairs of the party. The masses in the hall are asked to listen to them, vote for them, and approve their program.

Such a procedure for creating a party fundamentally contradicts what democracy entails. It is no coincidence that Robert Dahl begins his discussion of it with the statement that every member of a democratic association has the right to participate in its management. The division between a self-appointed presidium and an acclamating mass is absolutely undemocratic. Organizations created and functioning in this manner will never be able to achieve democracy, because they are irrelevant to it by their very nature.

The Norm of Uncertainty

But how can we allow equality with other participants in the association if their thoughts and desires are not controlled by us? They may behave unpredictably and fail to support us—the most competent and intelligent people in this hall. And here, alongside the fear of the people, arises another horror of the post-Soviet politician: uncertainty. What should I do if I am not elected? At one time Gorbachev demonstrated his own example to the entire country: at the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, he was elected from the "Red Hundred" of the CPSU, where a non-competitive list of 100 candidates was put to the vote. Later, malicious tongues claimed that if there had been 101 people on the list of candidates at the Plenum of the Central Committee, Gorbachev would have been the only one not elected. Whether this is true or not is extremely difficult to judge today. But the fear of uncertainty is certainly present here.

Uncertainty as an institutional practice of democracy flows directly from the principle of equality and serves as the second point of rejection in post-Soviet political theory. Precisely for this reason, in today's Russia, the federal list of the "Yabloko" party was removed from elections, as were the most prominent candidates in single-mandate districts. However, the situation in the opposition is not much better. What will happen if Putinists win in the "beautiful Russia of the future"? This question is periodically raised on emigrant forums and nowadays. Is it necessary to limit competition "for a time" by excluding from it a huge part of society "sickened" by Putinist propaganda and handing over all power again to a few "most wise" and knowledgeable ones? Professor Dahl wrote that such regimes always rely on the violent suppression of their opponents. I will add: even if the country is ruled in this way by "people with good faces," it is still a tyranny.

The unpredictability of political games in democracy is compensated by "mercy to the fallen" not as a call, but as a fully functioning practice. Those who lose elections are not destroyed and do not lose the right to public judgment. They move into opposition, whose opinion must be taken into account when making political decisions. The first to write about this was John Stuart Mill. The majority in democracy serves only as a sum of minorities; it is never formed once and for all. Not only are election results determined by the majority, but the majority itself is formed during the electoral campaign. People's interests and views are subject to periodic changes. Freedom of their expression of will is served by equal and transparent procedures of democratic competition with an open result. Democracy does not fear conflict, because the equality of all political participants makes them free to remain in the game and win after some time.

Meanwhile, how well do matters stand with equality and unpredictability in the very homeland of modern democracy? We should not forget that Donald Trump effectively did not admit his defeat in 2020 and continues to speak of a "stolen victory." However, another fact of American politics is even worse: if a certain decision is supported by the richest, it will be adopted, even if it does not suit the majority of poorer people. This is what equality and unpredictability look like 250 years after the American Revolution. According to many researchers, the growth of wealth inequality in the United States serves as the key cause of the current crisis of democracy. At the same time, the liberals' disregard for "rednecks" in the Midwest is very similar to the haughtiness of their Soviet colleagues towards the working class in late Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, this is not the only example of the negative influence of the periphery on the practices of the core of the world-system. What does Philadelphia sovereignty and its profanation in the modern world have to do with it? We will discuss that in the next article.