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Encountering New Perspectives
Freshman Address to the Class of 2007
November/December 2003

Delivered on October 11, 2003, by Richard Levin ’74PhD

This spring, as you were coming to the end of your high school years, I got my first inspiration for what I might say to you when you arrived here. I was sitting in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, listening to a splendid lecture by one of my favorite historians, Garry Wills, a Yale alumnus who has written brilliantly on topics as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, and Catholic theology. As the topic of the annual Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Professor Wills had chosen Henry Adams, the great-grandson of John Adams whose autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was recently voted the best nonfiction work of the twentieth century.

To everyone’s surprise, Professor Wills took as his text not the famous autobiography but an anonymously published, best-selling, and little-remembered political novel entitled Democracy. In describing the novel, Professor Wills made repeated reference to Adams' treatment of related subjects in his magisterial, nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. This intrigued me, because reading and talking about history, especially the early history of the United States, is one of my passions. And so, sitting and listening to Garry Wills last March, I decided that I would tackle Henry Adams' monumental historical work and somehow find in it material to provide a framework for this morning’s welcoming address.

Months later, with summer’s end approaching, I found myself in a situation I am sure each of you will confront more than once in your time at Yale. I had an assignment due, and I hadn’t finished the reading. The end of August was near, and I had read only 200 of the 1200 pages Adams devotes to the Jefferson years.

I fell back on the sound advice that Viper offered to Maverick in the classic action film, Top Gun: “A good pilot must constantly re-assess.” I re-assessed, and reached a conclusion that I now pass on to you as advice: “Don’t be tempted to write papers on books you haven’t read.” And so I went to Plan B.

I remembered that earlier in the summer I had read two provocative new books on international affairs. One of these books, The Future of Freedom, was written by Yale College graduate and Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria.1 The other, World on Fire, is the work of Amy Chua, a professor in the Yale Law School.2

Both books examine the consequences of the spread of democracy around the globe. Zakaria notes that in 1900 not a single country in the world established its government by an election in which every adult citizen held the franchise. Today, 119 do, nearly two-thirds of the all the countries in the world. To citizens of the United States, who have enjoyed a long, continuous tradition of free elections, this would seem to be unambiguous good news. But Zakaria and Chua think otherwise, and they advance powerful arguments and abundant historical detail to support their views.

I cite these books because they exemplify an important feature of the experience you are about to have during the next four years. Both books challenge conventional wisdom and require us to reconsider what we believe to be true. And just as these books challenge us all to think for ourselves, so will your Yale College experience—from the books you read to the professors and classmates you encounter—challenge each of you to re-examine your beliefs and re-define yourself as a person.

Encouraging the spread of democracy around the globe is as old as the American republic itself. Twenty years before he sent Meriwether Lewis on his journey to the Pacific, Thomas Jefferson imagined the United States spanning the North American continent. He desired this not so much to increase the power of the young nation, but to disseminate its values and provide inspiration for the whole world. Near the end of his life, he wrote: “[T]he flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism."3 A century later, “Making the world safe for democracy” was more than a slogan to Woodrow Wilson; it was a creed.

Today, Zakaria argues, we have come to identify democracy not with a complex of constitutional arrangements that protect individual liberty and guarantee a rule of law, but rather with one simple defining characteristic—free elections. We have made free elections a central objective of American foreign policy. Yet, as Zakaria points out, in countries without a strong constitution, an independent judiciary, a free press, and the other trappings of liberal democracies, elected leaders can, and often do, become tyrants. Zakaria provides many examples, such as Serbia and Ghana, to illustrate how, too often, democratically elected governments suppress liberty. In juxtaposition, he cites Singapore and Jordan, where in the absence of free elections, citizens have considerably more freedom than those in many countries with elected governments.

Zakaria not only expresses concern about democracies abroad that lack constitutional safeguards to protect individuals; he also attacks direct democracy at home. He objects to the reliance of politicians on opinion polls, the use of primaries to select presidential candidates, and the increased openness of decision processes in Congress and federal agencies—which he argues makes those bodies more, rather than less, susceptible to the influence of lobbyists. Perhaps less surprising in light of recent developments is his concern about the use of plebiscites, which California has developed to a high art. Those government agencies that function best, he argues, are those with ultimate accountability but considerable insulation from day-to-day political pressures, such as the judiciary, the Federal Reserve System and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Robert Kagan, another Yale College alumnus who has himself written a challenging and controversial book this year,4 has denounced Zakaria as an “elitist” for holding views that seem to cut so against the grain of most popular thinking. Is it a problem, Kagan asks, that politicians are more sensitive to public opinion? That the discipline enforced through the “backroom politics” of parties has waned? That government decision processes are more open? Herein lies the value of encountering ideas that challenge conventional thinking. By forcing us to confront our natural bias in favor of democracy and democratization, Zakaria makes us think. And when he reminds us that virtually all his central ideas find support in the Federalist Papers, and most especially in those written by James Madison, we are inclined to think even harder.

My role today, and that of Yale’s faculty for the next four years, is not to tell you what to think about such matters as these. Rather, drawing on our experience as students and scholars, we can help you identify the sources that will best inform you. We can help to illuminate both sides of the argument, perhaps favoring one view over another and citing our reasons why. But above all our role will be to encourage you to think for yourself. So I won’t tell you whether I think Zakaria is right or wrong about the relative importance of liberty and democracy abroad or about the alleged excesses of democracy at home. Just let me suggest that you read the book, and perhaps the Federalist Papers as well. And then, for the other side of the argument, you might start with How Democratic Is the American Constitution?,5 the most recent book of Robert Dahl, Yale’s most distinguished political scientist of the past half century.

Amy Chua shares Zakaria’s discomfort with spreading democracy around the world when in practice democracy means majority rule without the constitutional protection of the individual supported by a rule of law. But her argument extends further. She observes that the United States and international agencies like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization are not only exporting a simple-minded notion of democracy; they are also encouraging free market economics of the most rudimentary form, without the regulatory structures used in advanced economies to limit corruption, protect consumers and laborers, and moderate tendencies toward widening the gap between rich and poor. And to this potentially volatile mix of unconstrained free market democracy, she adds a new element that is frequently overlooked—the presence, in a great many developing countries, of a minority group that controls a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth. Examples include the Chinese in Indonesia, Burma, and the Philippines, whites in South Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, the Ibo in Nigeria, and Croatians in the former Yugoslavia.

The presence of what Chua calls “market dominant minorities” exacerbates the strains caused by global pressures to open protected markets and to democratize political systems. She cites examples of “backlash” against globalization that take three characteristic forms. One, as in Zimbabwe, is expropriation of the wealth of market dominant minorities by democratically elected representatives of the majority ethnic group. We might think of this as democracy triumphing over market forces. The second is the formation of a ruling coalition in which the market dominant minority exercises substantial influence, usually through ties with a corrupt government led by representatives of the majority. Marcos' alliance with Chinese in the Philippines is one such example of the market triumphing over democracy. Finally, the backlash against the dominant minority may take the form of systematic violence, or even genocide, as in the ethnic cleansing of the Croatians and the slaughter of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Chua argues that external pressures for free market democracy in the presence of a market dominant minority will typically lead to one of these three unsatisfactory outcomes.

Professor Chua’s provocative ideas won’t be the only ones you will encounter in Yale College. Here you have the opportunity to interact with professors who are at the frontier of discovery, enlarging the range of what we know or providing novel interpretations of what we thought we knew. They will confront you with new perspectives, new ways of looking at the familiar, and these new perspectives will challenge you to re-examine your values, attitudes, and beliefs.

This is no less true of the classmates you will meet here and the new friends you will make. You come from all 50 states and 50 countries around the world. One of you is a tenth-generation Yalie and another, who comes from a town in the Midwest with a population of 268, is the first in his family to attend college. From the diverse experiences you will encounter, you cannot fail to learn.

The new perspectives you will confront here may unsettle you, but they will cause you to think more deeply—about yourself, your immediate community, and the wider world that surrounds you. Here you will expand your horizons, develop your critical capacities, and grow as a person in every dimension. The opportunities are boundless. I know you will make the most of them.  

Footnotes

1: Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

2: Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

3: Jefferson to Adams, September 12, 1821, in Lester J. Cappon, editor, The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959).

4: Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

5: Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

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