I'm pleased to have a chance to take part in this discussion of Mike Signer's book, which is not only a rewarding meditation on politics in its own right but also a timely intervention in the public debate following the collapse of the neoconservative attempt to identify U.S. foreign policy (at least in rhetoric) with democracy promotion. Let me begin by defending Mike's roundly-criticized reference to Hugo Chavez as a demagogue. If Chavez is not a demagogue, then neither was Juan Peron or Huey Long or any number of other populist politicians who bent or broke the law in the name of defending the people against exploitative elites or foreign nations.

In most cases, the evils that demagogues claim to oppose on behalf of the people are real, even if the demagogue exaggerates them. We shouldn't assume that, because demagogy is a bad system, the groups that oppose the demagogue are necessarily virtuous. On the contrary--societies that produce electoral or extra-legal rebellions led by demagogues almost invariable are deeply flawed societies in need of reform. The goals of the demagogic leader's movement may be perfectly legitimate--an end to colonial rule or foreign economic domination, the concentration of wealth and power in an aristocracy, plutocracy or self-perpetuating political class. The problem lies with the methods, not the goals. Populism channeled through constitutional democracy has a chance to produce lasting reform. Populism channeled against constitutionalism all too often replaces one form of lawless misrule with another.

Mike Signer is right to emphasize constitutionalism as the precondition for democracy. His emphasis on political culture is also persuasive. But political economy matters, too. Our own history as a nation has provided a prolonged and sometimes bloody experiment showing the importance of economic and social structure to constitutional politics. Both the North and the South were heirs to the British tradition of constitutionalism, individual liberty, and the rule of law. But notwithstanding a common Protestant, Lockean liberal, Anglo-American culture, the South developed a political culture resembling that of Latin American banana republics more than that of the North and Midwest.

The reason was the plantation economy, which endured beyond the abolition of slavery (and exists in some form in parts of the South today). The plantation system created a society divided between a small oligarchy of wealthy landowners, a weak and subservient class of professionals like lawyers and professors working for them, a tiny and weak urban working class, a large number of poor farmers and a large population of slaves, sharecroppers or campesinos. It didn't matter whether the local cultural legacy was that of constitutional, liberal Britain or despotic, Counter-Reformation Spain. In both Anglo-America and Latin America, similar economic structures produced similar results: perpetual political war between the propertied oligarchs and populist demagogues, with each side--not only the demagogues--resorting to lawlessness and sometimes terrorism in the struggle.

I think that there are at least two implications of this analysis for efforts by the U.S. to encourage democracy abroad. The first is that we should not be too quick to assume that culture prevents some nationalities, like Muslim Arabs, from establishing constitutional democracies. In that sense the analysis is optimistic. But it is pessimistic insofar as it accepts the conclusions of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Harrington, Jefferson and others who argued that formal democracy in a country without a politically-dominant, independent middle class is probably doomed. The lesson of the American South, for us as well as others, is that it is not enough to have a culture of constitutionalism in a society with the economy and class and caste system of a banana republic.