Doing things with right–wing democracy promotion

Regular readers of this blog know that all three of us are pretty much of one mind when it comes to the new conservative enthusiasm for global democracy promotion. Let’s just say we’re skeptical.

But if we take such things seriously, we have to ask hard questions, like: Why are conservatives supportive of democracy promotion? They’re obviously deeply suspicious of the political views and preferences of most of the people all over the world, given their propensity to complain about the decidedly anti-American views of so many of those people. Given that pretty serious problem, I think we can reasonably conclude that democracy, in this discourse, is primarily being treated as an instrumental good; its connection to free minds and markets, economic development, and so on. There’s a rather massive literature on whether or not, how much, and precisely how such things are correlated with and meaningfully caused by democratic institutions, but let’s set all that aside and say that these links can plausibly be maintained. Fair enough; that’s a perfectly good reason to support democratic reforms and institutions.

But if we’re to treat democracy as primarily instrumental in its value, we have to consider the importance of other strategies that might make significant contributions to that goal. This is all an excuse to link to Jeffrey Sachs proposal, which he’s been peddling in various (PDF) forums, including a forthcoming book, that suggests that extreme poverty could be eliminated for 150 billion dollars a year. I come to this viaDan Drezner (who for my money has a higher non-hack score for a conservative than Tacitus, although since I believe he voted for Kerry he may have lost his club privileges) via Matt Yglesias.

A few points to make here. First, as Matthew points out, this plan hardly needs to be perfect to make doing it a moral imperative–eliminating only half of extreme global poverty would be well worth the money. This is a no-brainer for a utilitarian like Matt, but really, it’s hard to imagine a serious approach to global justice that wouldn’t make such assistance a duty.

Second, if we value democracy for it’s freedom and development effects, we desparately need to take this idea every bit as seriously as democracy promotion via other and perhaps less efficient methods we’ve been pursuing lately.

Five years ago, most American conservatives would have laughed off such a plan as liberal dogoodism run amuck. This would have been more or less consistent with their worldview. The shift toward democracy promotion puts them in a far more difficult position.

I’m glad to see Drezner step up to the plate and give the Sachs plan a provisional endorsement. I should add that like Dan and Matt, except more so, I’m not really in a position to comment on the value or likely success of Sachs plan with any confidence. What I’ve seen so far looks promising, and I hope to read the book and comment on the plan further at some point, if I find I have anything interesting to say about it.

(and for the record, I know conservatives can handle a great deal of internal contradiction in their political views with relative ease. Still, shining a bright light on such contradictions is in this case a win-win proposition. Either we demonstrate the shallowness of their democracy rhetoric, or we trick them into supporting a good (and liberal) outcome).