Thomas Fazi is an interesting German who has just produced an article How Western Democracy Died which reminded me of a couple of books which presaged the current disenchantment with western liberalism - David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (2019) and Steve Levinsky’s How Democracies Die (2019)
Whether
in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across
Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalised and
legal systems are weaponised to suppress opposition. In recent
months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic
institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one
example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the
wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar
measures too.
In
theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending
democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites
maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of
legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen.
What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites
manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian
means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or
democracy in name only.
As
far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term
“post-democracy”
to describe the fact that, even though Western
societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly
become a meaningless facade.
Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles,
orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared
neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalisation
— and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or
economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role,
helpless in the face of political and corporate power.
The
historical defeat of socialism shrank the ideological space in the
West, foreclosing any fundamental challenge to capitalism and
enabling the emergence of a technocratic, depoliticised governance
model underpinned by the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative)
consensus around neoliberalism — centred on individual
responsibility, market hegemony and globalisation.
Geopolitically,
meanwhile, US “hyperpower” status allowed it to aggressively
assert global hegemony, creating a unipolar “new world order”.
This was underpinned by structural economic shifts within the West:
the decline of traditional manufacturing, and the Fordist-Keynesian
social contract, replaced by services, labour dispersion, precarity
and fragmentation. Most Western countries saw manufacturing
employment decline by a third-to-half in absolute numbers. This
pulverised the working class as a unified political subject — along
the way wrecking trade unions and other material symbols of postwar
mass politics. Beyond
these institutional shifts, meanwhile, unelected
elites increasingly interfered in the democratic processes of member
states.
The ECB’s “monetary coup” against Berlusconi in 2011, where the
central bank effectively forced the prime minister to leave office by
making his ouster the precondition for further support for Italian
bonds and banks, is one good example here. The financial blackmail of
Greece’s Tsipras government is another. Taken together, anyway,
these events led some observers to suggest that
the EU was becoming a “post-democratic prototype” — one
fiercely opposed to national sovereignty and democracy both.
Western
liberal democracy, even minimally defined as representative
government based on universal suffrage, is a very recent phenomenon.
Full male suffrage emerged in a limited number of countries only
between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
Women’s suffrage generally came after the Second World War.
Effective voting rights for racial minorities, such as African
Americans, arrived decades later. In short, democracy as universal
adult suffrage, regardless of wealth, property, race or class, has
existed for mere decades. Previously, it was the exclusive domain of
propertied elites, or else based on sex or skin colour. All
the same, it’d be wrong to idealise the mid-century West. Even
then, democracy in its substantive sense remained heavily
constrained. Though the ruling classes were forced — under pressure
from popular movements, the Cold War, and the threat of social unrest
— to extend voting rights and acknowledge a range of political and
social rights, they did not do so willingly. On the contrary, they
were often driven by the fear that the masses could pose a real
threat to the established social order — that workers might use
democracy to overturn existing power relations.
As
a result, alongside economic concessions, Western elites also
constrained democratic participation in various ways. Modern
constitutional systems — including nascent supranational ones like
the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 — explicitly
limited popular sovereignty. Elected governments were prevented from
enacting certain economic or social policies, or even challenging
existing international alliances. All
the while, power shifted. Parliaments got weaker, and technocrats and
judges grew more powerful, each in their way proving capable of
overriding national laws. This
was often justified as a way of protecting democracy from what elites
feared could be the irrational or destabilising demands of the masses
— a longstanding argument in liberal political thought that equates
too much popular participation with the risk of populism, mob rule or
economic irresponsibility.
This challenges common conceptions of the state: across the Western world, we
are accustomed to identifying the state with the executive and with parliament,
assuming that these institutions act in accordance with constitutions and the rule
of law. But this is a misunderstanding: the state doesn’t coincide with the
institutions of representative democracy. Rather, the two belong to entirely
distinct spheres of politics. On the one hand, there is the politics of the state.
On the other, there is what we might call popular politics, embodying popular
sovereignty and typified by political parties, trade unions, social movements and
civil society. The state operates with a significant degree of autonomy from the
latter, meaning it is not only largely independent of civil society, but also of
parliaments and even governments themselves.
In theory, after all, state bureaucracies act as neutral executors of government
policy. In reality, they often act independently of, or even in opposition to, elected
parliaments and governments, particularly when it comes to protecting institutional
continuity, legal norms or elite interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for
example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes
to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England
derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is another example here. This phenomenon
is obviously much more pronounced when national governments are subordinated to
supranational institutions, as in the European Union. And then, of course, you have
the military and intelligence bureaucracies, which today arguably exercise more
influence than ever before (see, for instance, the Russiagate hoax).
The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and
continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those
declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true
— even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state
may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics.
In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse,
but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western
democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state
power into blindingly sharp relief.
Further Reading; In the past decade, we have been deluged by hundreds of
books on the decline of liberal democracy and the various threats it faces –
very little of it worth much.
- The book I recommend as a guide through this confusion is David Runciman’s
How Democracy Ends (2017) which uses the metaphor of a “mid-life crisis” to explore 4 different
ways in which democracy might end – a coup; catastrophes such as ecological or pandemics;
technological takeover; or “improved systems”. One of its nice features is embodying guides to
other books. Violence stalks the fringes of our politics and the recesses of our imaginations, without ever
arriving centre stage. It is the ghost in this story. Second, the threat of catastrophe has changed. Where the
prospect of disaster once had a galvanising effect, now it tends to be stultifying. We freeze in the face of our
fears. Third, the information technology revolution has completely altered the terms on which democracy
must operate. We have become dependent on forms of communication and information-sharing that we
neither control nor fully understand. All of these features of our democracy are consistent with its getting
older. I have organised this book around these three themes: coup; catastrophe; technological takeover.
takeover of democratic institutions is still a realistic possibility. If not, how could democracy be subverted
without the use of force being required? Would we even know it was happening?
The spread of conspiracy theories is a symptom of our growing uncertainty about where the threat really lies.
Coups require conspiracies because they need to be plotted by small groups in secret, or else they don’t
work. Without them, we are just left with the conspiracy theories, which settle nothing.
calamitous climate change, bio-terrorism, the rise of the killer robots could all finish off democratic
politics, though that would be the least of our worries. If something goes truly, terribly wrong, the
people who are left will be too busy scrabbling for survival to care much about voting for change.
But how big is the risk that, if confronted with these threats, the life drains out of democracy anyway, as we
find ourselves paralysed by indecision?But low-level, semi-intelligent machines that mine data for us and stealthily take the decisions
we are too busy to make are gradually infiltrating much of our lives. We now have technology
that promises greater efficiency than anything we’ve ever seen before, controlled by corporations
that are less accountable than any in modern political history. Will we abdicate democratic responsibility
to these new forces without even saying goodbye?
A mid-life crisis can be a sign that we really do need to change. If we are stuck in a rut, why don’t
we make a clean break from what’s making us so miserable? Churchill famously called democracy
the worst system of government apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time.
He said it back in 1947. That was a long time ago. Has there really been nothing better to try since
then? I review some of the alternatives, from twenty-first century authoritarianism to twenty-first
century anarchism.
Alasdair Roberts (2018) does look to be the best of the more detailed analyses of the deficiencies of the contemporary American system. Roberts produced recently the quite excellent
"Strategies for Governing"
- I was not at all taken with ”The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how
to save it”; Yashka Mounk (2018) but I’m biased since he worked for Tony Bliar’s Foundation.
It has an index but no bibliography.
- Empire of Democracy – the remaking of the West since the Cold War 1971-2017 by Simon
Reid-Hentry (2019) was promising enough for me to buy it but was subsequently the focus of a
brilliant and critical master-class review by historian Richard Evans (click title for that).
It too has an index but no bibliography.
- How Democracy Ends, David Runciman (2019)
- How Democracies Die S Levinsky and D Ziblatt (2019)
- Democracy in America – what has gone wrong and what we can do about it Page and Gilen
(2020 edition)
- Twilight of Democracy – the seductive lure of authoritarianism Anne Applebaum (2020)
reviewed by Quillette and by Helen Epstein
- Autocratization turns viral (Democracy report 2021 - from V-Dem institute) gives a useful
update of how democracy continues to slip globally…
-
Autocracy
– the dictators who want to run the world Anne Applebaum (2024)
The last 3 books remind me of a post I did 4 years ago about authoritarianism
The "authoritarian personality” was a major focus of academic interest in the immediate
post-war period not only with Hannah Arendt (quoted) but, even more, Theodor Adorno.
I was introduced to political sociology in the early 1960s by a Romanian, Zevedei Barbu
who had produced in 1956 a book which drew on both social psychology and sociology
- Democracy and Dictatorship.
One of my tests for a book is to go to the end and look at the bibliography and index.
I trust those authors who refuse to follow the dreadful academic tradition of listing every
book they know on a subject - and who have the confidence, instead, to select a small
number of books they recommend for the reader’s attention. Particularly if they then
add a few explanatory notes about each of the books. And this article suggested that I
should use the index to check that the chapter headings promised in the book’s
Contents are actually followed.
