TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DEMOCRACY
Second Wave civilization the fight for majority rule was humane and liberating. In still-industrializing countries, like Nouth Africa today, it remains so. In Second Wave societies, majority rule almost always meant a fairer break for the poor. For the poor were the majority.
Today, however, in countries shaken by the Third Wave, precisely the opposite is often the case. The truly poor no longer necessarily have numbers on their side. In a good many countries they—like everyone else—have become a minority. And barring economic holocaust, they will remain so.
Not only is majority rule, therefore, no longer adequate as it legitimating principle, it is no longer necessarily humanizing or democratic in societies moving into the Third Wave.
Second Wave ideologues routinely lament the breakup of mass society. Rather than seeing in this enriched diversity an opportunity for human development, they attack it as “fragmentation” and “Balkanization” and attribute it to the moused “selfishness” of minorities. This trivial explanation nubstitutes effect for cause. For the rising activism of minorities IN not the result of a sudden onset of selfishness; it is, among olher things, a reflection of the needs of a new system of production which requires for its very existence a far more varied, colorful, open, and diverse society than any we have ever known.
The implications of this fact are enormous. It means, for example, that when the Russians try to suppress the new diversity, or cork up the political pluralism that comes with it, they actually (to use their own jargon) “fetter the means of production”—they slow down the economic and technological transformation of society. And we hi the noncommu-nist world face the same choice: we can either resist the lhrust toward diversity, in a futile last-ditch effort to save our* Second Wave political institutions, or we can acknowledge diversity and change those institutions accordingly.
The former strategy can only be implemented by totali-tnrian means and must result in economic and cultural stagnation; the latter leads toward social evolution and a minority-based twenty-first-century democracy.
To reconstitute democracy in Third Wave terms, we need lo jettison the frightening, but false, assumption that increased diversity automatically brings increased tension and conflict in society. Indeed, the exact reverse can be true. Con-Iliet in society is not only necessary, it is, within limits, desir-
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