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27 New Persp. Q. 2 (2010)

handle is hein.journals/nwpsp27 and id is 1 raw text is: Consumer Democracy vs. Good Governance Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time, Churchill famously said in the House of Commons in 1947. The prestige of the great British statesman who held forth when the empire was already on its last legs was such that democratic institutions have scarcely evolved as the world moved on, even after the end of the Cold War. In a way, Churchill pre-figured Francis Fukuyama, who declared the end of his- tory in 1989, postulating that the defeat of communism in the Cold War meant the --triumph of Western-style liberal democracy suitable for all of M E N T humanity. Despite the growing significance of forms of non- Western modernity that have emerged in East Asia, as Kishore Mahbubani notes, Fukuyama sticks by his anlaysis 20 years later. Perhaps it is time to take another look at democracy as we know it, not just because of the soft-authoritarian success of a Singapore or a China, but because the West itself has changed. In much of the West today, especially in the United States, we no longer live in an industrial democracy, no less the agriculture-based landed aristocracy in which most contemporary political systems and their constitutions were originally conceived. We live in a consumer democracy. Far from the insulated homogeneity and small scale of traditional societies with their earthy virtues of place, or even from the time when capital and labor confronted each other across the barricades or through disciplined mass parties, today we live in a largely middle-class (albeit with growing inequality), densely networked, cosmopolitan society. We enjoy a vast diversity of ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs and lifestyles that transcend all ideological boundaries. Rightly, we celebrate this manifold richness. Yet, a deep distortion has emerged. In a consumer democracy, where the feedback signals from politics, the media and the market all steer society toward immediate I ' * WINTER 2010 COM

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