John Lloyd

The shrinking of U.S. power, now pretty much taken for granted and in some quarters relished, may hurt news coverage of human rights and the uncovering of abuses to them. But not necessarily. Journalism is showing itself to be resilient in adversity, and its core tasks – to illuminate the workings of power and to be diverse in its opinions – could prove to be more than “Western” impositions.

When the British Empire withdrew from its global reach after the World War Two, the space was occupied, rapidly and at times eagerly, by the resurgent United States, at the very peak of its relative wealth and influence in the immediate postwar years. What it brought with it was a culture of journalism that was increasingly self-confident in its global mission: not just to describe the world, but to improve it. Some European journalism had that ambition too, but these were nations exhausted by war. The Americans, at the peak of their influence in the postwar years, had the power, wealth, standing and cocksureness to project their vision of what the world should be.

Now, American power too will shrink, and the end of U.S. hegemony (it was never an empire in the classic sense) will mean that there will be a jostling for power, influence, and above all resources by getting-rich-quick mega-states like China, India and Brazil. They will project their view of what the world should be — they have already begun, some (China) more confidently than others (India, Brazil).

Whether this will mean that the illumination of the workings of power around the globe will be better or worse will be one of the large themes for journalism of the next decades. In his The World America Made, Robert Kagan thinks, by implication, that it could be worse, because he believes the U.S. did most for human freedom round the world and a loss of American power means a threat to the protection it offered to democratic change. He writes that “perhaps democracy has spread over a hundred nations since 1950 not simply because people yearn for democracy, but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy.” I think he’s right in this, and that his “perhaps” is pretty definite. And if he is right, it means that the impulse to probe and expose will be weaker.

The U.S., however imperfectly, often hypocritically, and at times mendaciously, nevertheless possesses a default mode in favor of freedom and human rights. So do the European states. But though the European Union is more populous and has a higher GDP than the U.S., it’s disunited and likely to stay that way. So the decline of the U.S., even if it remains only relative rather than absolute (as Kagan believes), is the important issue. It could mean that the narratives of human rights, told by Western governments, by NGOs and above all by journalism, will become fainter.

Western journalism has developed human rights, and their abuses, into one of its major themes. Where the “something must be done” approach to issues was once largely confined to domestic matters, it is now writ globally. Western journalists, especially those from Anglophone countries, feel empowered to report and comment critically on the authoritarian and despotic policies of every country everywhere – the more so since the end of the Cold War meant that the pressure from Western governments to soft-pedal the abuses of tyrants who were on our side was no longer felt in the editorial offices.

The journalism of human rights was often valuable and sometimes influential, making abuses known and getting something done about them. Behind it, though unacknowledged for the most part, was Western, mainly American, power. Western reporters and columnists could take these stances because they had the moral backing of the most powerful nation on earth and its European allies. And sometimes, when they got into trouble, the governments of these states would intervene to try to get them out of it (not always successfully). The clout that the New York Times, the BBC, Le Monde – or, for that matter, Reuters – can exert is partly due to the ideals they espouse, partly underpinned by the global power of the West, with the U.S. ever in the lead.

When the SARS epidemic was suppressed by the Chinese authorities in 2002-2003, the brave efforts of the Chinese media to cover it (and they did, against threats and even imprisonment) were greatly assisted when Elizabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times picked up the story and her paper put it on the front page, shaming the regime. The struggle for free speech and free elections in China waxes and wanes, and it may be that over the next decade, there will be more openness. But if there isn’t, and China’s power puts the U.S. in a greater shade, China’s journalists will have an even harder job than in the recent past.

Western journalism, which has itself been hegemonic for many years, will face greater challenges from states and their media that reject the human rights narrative – or at least, use it selectively. It’s already happening: The new, global TV channels sponsored by states like China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela spend much of their time trashing the Western media’s coverage of their states. Their common approach can be summed up by the remark of Jesus in Matthew, chapter 7: “You hypocrite, first cast the beam out of your own eye; and then shall you see clearly to cast out the mote out of your brother’s eye.” Or more simply: What makes you Westerners so great? (It isn’t the British tabloids.)

The difference between the state-sponsored journalists and the majority of the Western ones is that the latter, for good or ill, are acting independently. We really do think abuses of human rights are bad things everywhere and that common standards should be applied to them. The arguments between state-sponsored journalists and those who have some sense of professional independence are a dialogue of the deaf: If they continue, we get a spiral of incomprehension and contempt.

There is another possibility, though. Almost everywhere in the world, there are journalists who get it – get, that is, that independent journalism’s claim must be based on an attempt to tell the same kind of truths to all kinds of power. If a Chinese reporter does some good reporting and analysis on the fact that the U.S. incarcerates one in four of its young black male citizens, because he sees a problem in that, we should attend to his or her reportage as much as anyone else’s. If however the piece is thrown together to divert attention from the allegation made this week by Amnesty International that China executes “thousands” of criminals, then we shouldn’t.

My belief, from talking to journalists in Russia, China and India over the past few years, is that in all of these countries there is a growing core of reporters and editors who interpret their job as something of a moral duty and believe that independence and freedom are required to do that. Achieving that independence and freedom will not be easy, and will certainly not be safe. In the West, journalists who expose human rights abuses win awards and better salaries. In China they can go to jail. In Russia, they can get murdered – as was Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006, after a decade of fierce reporting from the killing grounds of Chechnya. She is only the most famed tip of an iceberg.

But in spite of that, my bet is that many of these men and women will carry on. They do see in Western reporting – especially investigative journalism – a model and seek to learn from it. But they will fashion their own tools to tackle the job they have set themselves. There is much in their societies – poverty, misuse of power, corruption – that demands the exercise of rigorous reporting. And as they do that, and as the power of their societies grows, they will become more confident – on their own professional account – to make judgments about the behavior of Western states as well as their own.

When they do, they will see a lot of motes in our eyes. We should then have a dialogue where both listen. And that will be good for us all.

PHOTO: Security officers stand guard at the foot of the stairs to stop journalists, whose names are not on the list of attendees allowed into a news conference by China’s Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai, during the ongoing National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s parliament, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 9, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Lee

In a remarkable column in Italy’s paper of record earlier this week, the columnist Ernesto Galli della Loggia flayed his country’s ruling class. The country is witnessing, he believes “a kind of incontinence and exhibitionism without restraint, a compulsive acquisitiveness,” rife within the highest circles of Italian society. This, mind you, after the departure of the highly acquisitive former Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

“It seems,” he writes, “that in this country, for bankers, for entrepreneurs, for senior officials, for celebrities and for politicians, for those who, in short, count for something, any reward is never enough, any privilege or treat is never too excessive, any show of wealth is never over the top.” The politicians, if not the richest, are still the most degraded, because of their elective positions of trust. The press, the justice system and the frequent leaks of the many wiretaps that Italy’s magistrates order show the snouts of a political class that are too often deep into troughs of money, luxury and privilege, funded either by the Italian taxpayer or by private interests avid for political favor.

Flaying the rich in one form or another is becoming a habit everywhere where freedom reigns in the world and even — more carefully and more dangerously — where it doesn’t, as in Russia and China, where the very rich often have the backing of the state, or sometimes, are the state. It’s happening because the financial crash is making many people poorer, and most people poorer relative to the rich, who still contrive to get richer and richer. The stagnation in middle- and working-class incomes in many parts of the Western world is often turning into real decreases in spending power. Insofar as that goes on — and a fragile improvement in Europe and North America may take hold, and once again raise all boats, or it may not — then privileges, treats and shows of wealth become more and more galling, even to moderates not previously given to envy or militancy.

In mid-19th century Europe and in the turn-of-the-century United States, novelists like Charles Dickens, Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser drew portraits of societies corrupted by greed and the lust for money and security. Now, the task of exposing those sores pass to journalists and academics, through a slew of books on inequality, financial malpractice and political and corporate corruption. In China, where such realistic exposes are frowned on and usually suppressed, the job again falls to the novelists, with harrowing pieces like Su Tong’s Rice or Jia Pingwa’s Turbulence, among many others. Many journalists try their best: But while exposes are published, few see the light of day unless the Communist Party’s propaganda department wishes it — which often means that the story has a pre-ordered happy ending, to the effect that what has been exposed is already corrected by the party’s intercession.

There is a kind of convergence happening between the Western developed economies and the leading developing ones. In the former, especially those in Western Europe, the conditions described by the novelists, and by reformers and radical politicians, led to a growth in state provision and an expanding network of health, pension and social provision (more so in Europe than in the U.S.). This was the result of protests over the decades, reform movements of every kind and the galvanizing effect of World War II, in which the masses who fought against fascism demanded a state that adopted many of the features of social democracy.

The welfare states created then, generous by past standards, are now being cut back. This is not a return to the days when children were hauling coal wagons along underground tunnels, or paupers were consigned to the workhouses. Nevertheless, the armies of the unemployed, many of them youthful, face tougher choices than their parents and even grandparents did, coming to maturity in postwar years, when employment was relatively full and horizons of both the state and of corporations were expanding. These were times, too, when the Soviet Union and China were committed to a failing and brutal system, India was ineradicably poor and Brazil, with other South American countries, oscillated between rackety civilian governments, and oppressive military-backed ones. At the time, freedom and wealth were obvious bedfellows.

The big developing countries, democratic or not, are now facing the same kind of strains decades on. Russia’s middle class became energized at the end of last year — their demands were for intellectual and press freedom and against corruption rather than for higher incomes. The prognostications for Vladimir Putin’s third term as president frame his coming term against this newly self-enfranchised class, and find him wanting. Corruption is also the issue driving less well covered but quite large (about 20,000 people on the streets) protests in Brazil: though there, the apparent willingness of President Dilma Rousseff to tackle the issue keeps the agitation civil.

In India, a movement headed by Kisan (better known as Anna) Harare against corruption rolled through the vast state last year. It was propelled by his hunger strikes and by his embrace of Gandhian principles of non-violence — and by the huge disparities of wealth, and allegations of the creation of massive offshore accounts, out of reach of the Indian tax and justice system. After arrests and off-on hunger strikes, and often backed by big demonstrations, the Harare-led movement’s pressure forced the government to pass an anti-corruption bill in Parliament last December — which was immediately condemned by Harare as weak. The protests continue.

China is the most dramatic. The country’s poverty level declined precipitously after capitalism was pronounced glorious in the eighties, but with that, the millions of workers in state enterprises lost their security, and many were made unemployed. Often, as Washington Post reporter Philip Pan details in his fluently revelatory narrative, Out of Mao’s Shadow (2008), this was only to see their former managers and city party bosses make millions from their plants’ privatization. Pan, on a visit to a coal mine that bears dismal comparison with the pits in Zola’s Germinal, notes that in China, 4 to 5 miners die for ever million tons of coal produced, against 1 in Russia and India and 0.05 in the U.S. and the U.K. So meager is the compensation paid to the families that it is more economically rational for the owners of the privately owned mines to pay restitution than to improve safety.

Protests in China are building, and they shake the leadership. In a press conference broadcast live on Chinese state television earlier this month, the retiring Wen Jiabao warned that the growing wealth gap, corruption and increasing hatred of the state could jeopardize the economic gains. Most startlingly, he warned that “mistakes like the Cultural Revolution may happen again. Any government official or party member with a sense of responsibility should recognize this.”

In West and East, in widely differing ways, the working, out-of-work, insecure middle and angry classes grow, and become less inhibited about their anger. Huge accumulations of wealth, corruptly or legally acquired, dance before the eyes of the 99 percent, who will never acquire a sliver of such riches. This is indeed, in Galli della Loggia’s words, “incontinence and exhibitionism without restraint, a compulsive acquisitiveness.” It makes people mad as hell. Will they not take it anymore? And where will they seriously not take it first?

PHOTO: A lawyer shows his professional identification card during a protest in front of the Justice Palace in Rome, March 15, 2012. Lawyers’ guilds say the reform planned by the government of Prime Minister Mario Monti will only increase legal costs, undermine the protection of the weak, reduce expertise and unleash an uncontrolled market in fees.

The Tea Party is over. In the way of parties that end, there are still people around. Those who remain search for a return of the old energy and make unconvincing demonstrations of people having a good time. But the central focus, the excitement, the purpose of the thing is dissipating. That is because the bad stuff that its members and boosters put out — lies, slanders, paranoia, ignorance — is losing what grip it had over the minds of people with minds. What’s left, though, is something else, which will not go away: the identification of moral choices blurred and contemporary indifferences ignored.

The core membership of the Tea Party is composed of people of the Christian faith, many of whom are devout Bible readers. The political scientists Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell, who have researched the attitudes of Tea Party members, found that party members were more concerned with putting God into government than with trying to pull government out of people’s lives. They will thus know well the Sermon on the Mount, which is spread across Matthew, chapters 6 and 7, and which contains the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, which art in heaven…”

It also contains a verse (Matthew 7:15), which runs: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” The Tea Party has been rich in false prophets, but it is presently getting something of a comeuppance, in part because of its ravening.

The heat of the Republican primaries, in which the Tea Party’s themes have been well rehearsed, have, paradoxically, tended to melt rather than fire up the group’s stars. First, Rush Limbaugh, whose talk show is aired daily to millions of listeners, insulted a student, Sandra Fluke, calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute.” He did so because she had argued, at a Democratic committee hearing, for health coverage for contraceptives. Limbaugh’s comments went out first on Feb. 29. He repeated the slur in different forms in two more broadcasts — and then made a stilted apology, as advertisers pulled ads from his show. Behind the support for him voiced by his network you could sense the unspoken question: Where is Rush’s tipping point? When does he become more loss than profit?

Glenn Beck, once the major draw on Fox News, found his tipping point last year and left the network in June. Roger Ailes, head of the company, said Beck had been insufficiently focused on his show, since he did so much else — tours, rallies, radio shows, and books — to capitalize on his fame and notoriety (and the advertisers were deserting him after he called President Obama a racist).

Capitalizing (a modern synonym for ravening) is the motive force: Outrageousness, followed or not by an apology, drives traffic to the shows and the rallies, and pushes income higher. On the left, comedian Bill Maher, who has often insulted Sarah Palin (“a moron”; joking that her down-syndrome child was a result of sex with John Edwards, the former Democratic presidential candidate now facing six felony charges; and at a concert in December 2010, many in the audience, presumably his fans, attested that he called Palin a “cunt”), makes enough money from his shows to donate $1 million to President Obama’s re-election campaign.

Partisans behave like partisans everywhere, no matter which side they’re on: They cheer their people, excuse them and at best say the other side is worse. Civility, obviously, suffers: Just as important, the political scene’s diversity, its challenges, its many shades of red and blue are all collapsed into an exchange of libel and defamation — excused, including by the mainstream media, as the necessary cost of free speech and being a public person. It’s a cost, but it’s not necessary.

There’s a new film out, Game Change, about Palin’s run for the vice-presidency. It’s not an outright attack on Palin. The Washington Post reviewer, Maura Judkis, said that “the film’s most scathing indictment is a symbolic one: It attacks our mutual inability to communicate.” But that movie is more chilling, for existential reasons, for Palin. It took Hollywood two decades to do a Margaret Thatcher movie (2011’s Iron Lady with Meryl Streep), but it does a Palin movie with Julianne Moore while the subject is still an active, and relatively young, political figure. Implicitly, the film is saying: Palin’s moment is over.

No mourning for Beck and Limbaugh as they withdraw from visibility; some for Palin, who levered herself up the steep ladder of politics from humble beginnings and a sketchy education and who had her moments of populist clarity — though more of populist rubbish. She and her colleagues, who switched back and forth between commentary, “journalism” (mainly for Fox, a major sponsor of Tea Party boosters), and political engagement, specialized in often mendacious attacks on Obama and the Democrats, constant denigration of the mainstream media, and aggressive victimization. There was also the view that the majority of decent, hardworking Americans had been silenced but would now be heard through the intercession of the Tea Party, who are bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh.

The paranoid in U.S. politics has a long history. (This is also true of most countries’ politics: In democracies, it has more or less free expression, while in authoritarian states, it is often co-opted by the regime to both placate and control the masses.) There has been much citing of Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article for Harper’s, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” with its tremendous opening sentence: “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Its conclusion is even better: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.” But those who use that, or any such judgment, as an assumption that this sums up all that needs be said on the subject, are wrong.

In a recent column in Time titled “Rick Santorum’s Inconvenient Truths,” Joe Klein wrote that Santorum and his wife, Karen, decided not to abort a child diagnosed in the womb as having Trisomy 18, a condition that so far means certain death soon after birth and for which doctors advise an abortion. Instead, they had the child and for three years cared for her. She died earlier this year. (CORRECTION Mar. 15: Santorum’s daughter was gravely ill in late January, but recovered.)

Klein describes their choice, and continues:

All right, I can hear you saying, the Santorum family’s course may be admirable, but shouldn’t we have the right to make our own choices? Yes, I suppose. But I also worry that we’ve become too averse to personal inconvenience as a society — that we’re less rigorous parents than we should be, that we’ve farmed out our responsibilities, especially for the disabled, to the state — and I’m grateful to Santorum for forcing on me the discomfort of having to think about the moral implications of his daughter’s smile.

What Klein sees is the moral challenge with which Santorum — and the best of the Tea Party-affiliated right — presents us. The routinization of abortion and of contraception; the reliance on the state to take care of the elderly and the physically and mentally disabled; the shifts we make with our children to pursue careers and make a larger income — all of these are, indeed, inconvenient truths, the kind of thing that fills the long minutes of wakefulness in the small hours, when our conscience will not let us sleep. And we in Western Europe are more dependent on the state to take care of these problems than are Americans.

Santorum’s brand of fundamentalist Catholicism is not to most tastes — indeed, it’s not to many Catholics’ tastes, and polls show that Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner, got more Catholic votes than Santorum did in some states. Gay marriage in the U.S., after long wrangling over it, is inching toward majority acceptance; the need for women in the working and middle classes to earn money to keep the family going cuts directly against his view that women should stay at home to have and raise the kids. Santorum has a powerful, but minority, message.

But for the heirs of the sixties, when sexual liberations of various kinds were framed as all gain and no pain, his pitch is a jolt — late, perhaps, but necessary nonetheless. The Tea Party’s aftertaste need not be only sour. Matthew’s chapters on the Sermon on the Mount also contain this much quoted line (Matthew 7:20): “By their fruits shall ye know them.” By our fruits we will know ourselves: One fruit worth tending is that which might, for thinking men and women of the right and the left, give a taste of doubt and reflection, which could be used to repair the resentments of America.

Do we want those whom we elect to represent us, or channel us? To exercise their own judgment, or to be a simple conduit for the views of the majority of their electors?

It’s an old question, and the most famous answer to it, still much treasured by parliamentarians, is the one given by the Anglo-Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke to his electors in Bristol, England in 1774. An opponent vying for Burke’s seat had seemed to promise the Bristol voters (not numerous, in those days) that he would vote as they told him to.

That, said Burke, was wrong. “You choose a member indeed; but when you choose him, he is not a member of Bristol, but a member of parliament.” As that member, he has to determine not just the will of the little electorate of Bristol but that of the nation. “Your representative owes you … his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving, you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Edmund Burke is a hero of the political right: Margaret Thatcher, before she was leader of the Conservatives and later prime minister, quoted him when making the same point as his. But his opinion also registered across the political divide, as well as across the centuries: Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and prime minister in its postwar government, thought the same, even more vehemently than Burke or Thatcher.

Nor is this confined to the “mother of parliaments” in London. It has been the common belief of electoral systems in democracies worldwide. And it’s been generally accepted that elected politicians need to exercise their judgment, especially at critical moments — rather than rely on the shifting opinions of the electorate.

When a U.S. president, burdened with the largest cares in the world, must decide what to do about momentous affairs of state — whether the possibility of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962 or the possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon 50 years later — no one says: Let’s have a referendum! Ask the people what they want!

We don’t want mob rule: We want the lonely man in the Oval Office to come up with the right answer. As Europe still trembles on the verge of the collapse of its common currency, we expect a lonely woman in the German Chancellery — Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and de facto leader of the European Union — to similarly get it right. And when Silvio Berlusconi’s government in Italy ran out of excuses, diversions and money, the political class in that country voted for an unelected, technocratic prime minister in Mario Monti to take over, precisely so he, in his own loneliness, could take decisions.

We don’t turn these decisions over to the people in referendums, because citizens wouldn’t know what to do — or if they did, they would have hundreds of different opinions. Someone has to take the general view, in the fullest knowledge possible of the up- and downsides of every option. Someone has to carry the can.

Besides, tests of the popular will through referendums* give much practical support to Edmund Burke’s view of political life. California, the most persistent referendum taker among the U.S. states, is lumbered with the results of a referendum from 1978, Proposition 13, which placed a cap on property taxes, the main source of funding for schools — and has had a worsening, cash-strapped school system ever since. In 2009, six referendums on taxes to patch up the vast holes in the state’s budget were all voted down, which means the crisis has deepened.

(*For the wonks among us, there’s an apparent choice as to whether to say “referendums” or “referenda.” While “a” is the plural form of a Latin noun ending in “um,” referendum isn’t a noun, but a gerund. So “ums.” No calls for a referendum on this permitted.)

European leaders aren’t keen on referendums either: The voting keeps giving them the wrong answers. In the past few years, referendums in France, Ireland and the Netherlands have all rejected one or other of the major decisions taken by the European Union, a reflection of the fact that Euroskepticism, once thought the preserve of only the British, is creeping over the Continent.

For liberals, referendums are a particular challenge. There’s some substance to the view of the right that the people should decide, and when they do, they’ll be right, both morally and politically. Surveys by London’s YouGov polling organization this year showed that the British, given the chance, would vote heavily to reduce net immigration to zero; vote quite decisively to give the names of convicted pedophiles to parents in their areas; only a little less convincingly to take the UK out of the European Union; and narrowly bring back the death penalty (abolished in most of the UK in 1969) for the murder of a police officer.

All of the measures that would be voted down, meanwhile, were liberal causes — as with the banning of the death penalty for all crimes and a relaxed immigration policy. Were Britain to go the way of Switzerland and take its key decisions by popular will through referendums, it would be a much less liberal place. And it would not be alone. Especially now, in Europe, when immigration is unpopular, the British mood on immigrants would meet agreement elsewhere.

Yet the Burkean consensus is under strain. Politicians, aware of their unpopularity and a growing public demand to be involved in political decisions, are now promising to consult the people by referendum more than they have. President Nicolas Sarkozy — who earlier this week said that France had “too many immigrants” — has promised referendums, not just on immigration but on education and welfare, as he seeks to claw down his Socialist opponents’ lead in the polls before the presidential election in April. David Cameron, the British premier, has called for a referendum in Scotland to determine whether or not it will remain in the UK. Most recently, the Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, has called a referendum on the European Stability Treaty, which would give Ireland access to extra funding but commit it to more budgetary control from Brussels.

The UK’s foremost pollster, the former journalist Peter Kellner, who is a co-founder and president of YouGov, sees this gathering tendency as a gathering threat to democratic politics. Noting the low trust ratings for politicians in his data, he told an audience in London on Monday that “the confidence of our political classes has been shot. They no longer take the big decisions.”

Some of this is the media’s fault, or at least our fault for loving the type of media that we do. The American media writer Neal Gabler (The Triumph of the American Imagination and much else worth reading) told Bill Moyers last month that Americans love political contests, and movies about great (or crooked) presidents, but they can’t bear to watch or read about the messy, tedious, compromising business of governance — “governance,” said Gabler, “is a lousy movie. And we don’t know how to deal with that.” And because Americans love movie politicians and hate the real ones, they withdraw their support from the real politicians in government and weaken them further. With such a public mood, Burke’s refusal to “sacrifice” his judgment to his electors’ opinions sounds like arrogance, the kind of thing few politicians would dare to say.

Yet it isn’t arrogance: Burke is still right. In democratic systems, we elect politicians to, more often than not, compromise; make deals; dilute their election rhetoric and ignore their voters’ demands. In doing so — if they do so in good faith and in pursuit of a general good — they serve democracy, and thus their voters, best.

PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) and Brazilian President Dilma Roussoff are pictured during their opening walk at the CeBit computer fair in Hanover, March, 6, 2012.  REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer