Don't Confuse "Republic" with Democracy

In case you aren't up on your international news:

Nepal to End 240-Year Monarchy With Vote for Republic

By Michael Heath and Jay Shankar

May 28 (Bloomberg) -- Nepal's parliament, meeting for the first time since former rebels won elections in April, will declare the Himalayan country a republic today, ending a 240- year-old monarchy.
The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has told King Gyanendra to quit the palace and become a ``common citizen.'' The king hasn't commented on his plans.
``There will be no problem to pass the resolution abolishing the monarchy,'' Maoist spokesman Krishna Bahadur Mahara said by phone yesterday from the capital, Kathmandu. ``It should go smoothly as most of the parties want it to happen.''

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This, by the way, is nepal:

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The aspect of this that I find most interesting is that an "oppressive monarchy" is being thrown off by what is, for all intents and purposes, a Maoist Republic. Fair or not, accurate or otherwise, every time a Maoist rebel yells "freedom!" I visualize a pig named snowball leading the fight against "oppressive" farmers.


The new Republic of Nepal should be careful that it does not become the People's Republic of Nepal, China.


We have a bias in the United States of America (well, we undoubtedly have many, but that's tomorrow's post) - we have an American bias. It begins with the patriotic dogma that America is the "greatest country on earth," and frankly, aside from the observation that different folks very often like different strokes, a good case can be made for our United States. The (prevalent) error, however, emerges when we Americans make the assumption that the practice of politics is a science and not an art; we stray when we follow the idealists in their insistence that good government is derived from good (a priori) ideas. Such adamance in favor of a "singularist" political philosophy, taken as a universal and trans-cultural premise, waxes of Hobbes and Marx as much as it does Locke, Montesquieu or Jefferson. Liberty, freedom, and democracy, we claim, all in the American mold, are the answer for all cultures - and the sooner the better.


Why, then, have words such as republic, democracy, and election become sacred? Or, at least, why does people's republic signify "them damn commies!" while republic remains untouchable? "Because," you might say, "we are a republic!" Well, yes, "We the People" most certainly are.


George Bernard Shaw's famous claim that "democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve," is a painful admission, and a nearly accurate one. It might be better said, I think, that "democracy ensures that we shall be governed no better than our ability." "Now hold on! Wait just a moment there!", I hear from the back, "democracy defines the American way of life!Don't go throwing the baby out with the bathwater!" But this isn't a criticism of democracy, and I'm certainly not defenestrating any children; I'm only suggesting that we learn to distinguish between the two. Democracy isn't good because it is called democracy - it is only good insofar as it provides freedom for the pursuit of happiness.

Nepal, like China, is nothing like our United States; furthermore, the United States did not become a "successful" democracy easily. Consider the things which were necessary (working as a whole) for our secular democratic republic to come about:

1. The rise of "individualism" through Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and many, many others.



2. The rebellion of Martin Luther, in the spirit of this individualism, which splintered western culture along religious lines, inevitably seperating religious and temporal authority.



3. Hundreds of years of English civil war in which royal oppression fostered popular hostility towards monarchist rule.



4. The defection of Henry VIII from the Catholic Church, leading into further monarchial oppression along religious lines, against all major religious groups.



5. The discovery of the New World



6. English and French warring, making possible the American Revolution in which a group of(then) extremist idealogues were able to establish a Republic far from the nation against which they had rebelled.

This is not to say that the 'rise' of democracy is a fluke. Quite to the contrary, it is almost self-evident that American democracy was the culmination - not an anomaly - of the past few centuries of Western civilization. Rather, I would argue that what the list above can teach us is that democracy is fragile; it does not "just flourish" wherever it finds itself. In fact, we too often forget (in our struggle to "bring democracy to the third world" and such) that the path to Western democracy has hardly been an easy one; its value has not always been recognized. It was the same idealism that birthed America which engulfed her in civil war a short time later. And however wrong his solution, Marx was right, after all, when he wrote that "for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation". Capitalism ultimately allowed democracy to succeed, but it was no cure-all, and it did so only with substantial difficulty; Smith's invisible hand was all too invisible for much of American history. When democracy was tried in France, it was done so by revolution, and with great cost. France engaged in what what Edmund Burke would describe as "a foolish imitation...which impaired their natural character without substituting in its place what perhaps they meant to copy, has certainly rendered them worse than formerly they were". His point is that democracy itself can kill as well as cure, and can in fact be more oppressive for its sheer strength. "Of this I am certain," Burke writes, "in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority...with much greater fury".

If Burke remarks are true of a democracy, they are doubly true of a Maoist republic. Socialist Republics have not only the oppression of the majority to fear, but the oppression of an oligarchy acting in the name of the people.


Time will tell if Nepal shall flourish under Maoism. I fear, however, that it will not, and that it will become one more nation to pay the steep price for a failed republic.