It has become obligatory when writing about democracy these days to reflect on the paradoxical condition it has found itself in at the turn of this century. Democratization has been heralded as the triumph of the last century internationally. Yet it seems to be in a relatively fragile condition in the United States if one is to judge by the proliferation of editorials, essays, and books analyzing “democracy's discontents.”

When asked what he thought was the most important thing that happened in the twentieth century, Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen responded that it was “the emergence of democracy as the preeminently acceptable form of governance.” Francis Fukuyama, to offer another example, confidently asserted in The End of History and the Last Man that the collapse of authoritarianism and socialism during the last half of the twentieth century has left “only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty.” Certainly the number of democratic countries has increased if we are to judge by the expansion of popular elections. The executive summary of a survey by Freedom House notes that “in 1900, there were no states which could be judged as electoral democracies by the standard of universal suffrage for competitive multiparty elections. The United States, Britain, and a handful of other countries possessed the most democratic systems…. By the close of our century liberal and electoral democracies clearly predominate….