Breakdown and Crises

No fewer than 6 very well-written books have been vying for my attention in recent days – all dealing with the sense of breakdown and crisis which is in the air.

Let me begin with the one I have managed to complete – not least because it's a very useful guide to the others

David Runciman is one of the few political scientists who writes both thoughtfully and extraordinarily well. His latest book - How Democracy Ends; (2018) – has me not only scribbling on every page but going to the internet to chase references. No less a reviewer than the political editor of The Observer has this to say of it -

Runciman’s flair for turning a pithy and pungent phrase is one of the things to admire about his writing. The cogency, subtlety and style with which he teases out the paradoxes and perils faced by democracy makes this one of the very best of the great crop of recent books on the subject. What he doesn’t offer is solutions, bluntly admitting “I do not have any”. There is penetrating diagnosis here, but no suggestion of a cure.

He considers the alternatives and rightly finds them wanting. The Chinese experiment with authoritarian capitalism may look seductive to those who think economic expansion is all that matters to a society, but can the repressive Beijing model survive the inevitable day when growth slows down?

Government by experts, “the rule of the knowers” or “the epistocracy”, was advocated by Plato and is still promoted by those who regard citizens as too stupid to be trusted with making decisions. The public wouldn’t wear that and “intellectuals” are just as prone to making terrible mistakes as the crowd.

Runciman seems attracted to the idea that technological advances could offer some form of “liberation”, but comes to the equivocal conclusion that this “includes all sorts of potential futures: some wondrous, some terrible, and most wholly unknowable”.

But it’s, appropriately, an historian whose very positive review puts the book in an historical context

The ancient Greeks may have invented democracy but they felt deeply ambivalent about it, regarding it as just one of the phases in the political cycle. It was not until the start of the 19th century that a democratic wave began to emerge again, in the Americas and briefly in southern Europe, and not until the second half of the 20th that representative democracy in the sense we have known it spread around the world.

In that relatively brief span of time, it was fought over by liberals and socialists, rejected – in its “bourgeois” form – by communists, and smothered by dictators who could rarely decide whether what they were doing was superseding or perfecting it.

After the second world war, parliamentary democracy got a new lease of life. When the cold war ended, the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to leave democracy as the only game in town. By the beginning of this century, most political scientists, especially but not only in the US, had come to believe that liberal democracy was the new normal, something to which the entire world should aspire.

The crushing of the Arab spring, and the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, could be written off as backsliding in polities whose democratic roots were shallow.

It was the 2016 US presidential elections that, in a single moment, changed an implausibly rosy (and complacent) outlook, replacing it with an equally implausible pessimism…..

Runciman 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

Historian Mazover’s review continues –

Runciman draws the contrast between the situation in Greece in 1967, when there was a very visible military coup with tanks on the streets of Athens, and 2015, the year of the referendum on whether to accept the European commission’s bailout deal, when some have argued the Greek government caved in the face of what amounted to a silent coup by its European partners. It becomes harder to say what is a real coup d’état and what is normal politics.

A second challenge is posed by the way we respond to the existential threats that surround us. In the past, Runciman argues, societies were galvanised by such threats: one need think only of the mass mobilisation that occurred around nuclear disarmament or the international response in the 1970s to rising pollution. World war itself created a sense of collective action; but the dwindling of mass conscription makes that unlikely in future. And today people seem paralysed when threatened with global warming or a nuclear accident: the prospect of catastrophe leads not to collective action but passivity.

Then there is the impact of the digital revolution, which is undermining democracy in numerous ways. We simply don’t sufficiently understand the impact of current forms of communication and information gathering. The problem with huge corporations such as Facebook is not their malevolence, nor the danger that they might rival states. They are run by people who are principally interested in profits not politics, and they are far less legitimate and more hierarchical than the political systems that govern us. But the modes of communication they encourage make a mockery of democracy for other reasons. They encourage instant gratification when democracy presupposes a capacity for frustration and patience. They encourage a pretence of authenticity, making politicians seem even more fake and contrived. The politicians who flourish are the ones who play along. Populism is the natural condition of democratic politics in the age of Twitter. The most successful democratic politicians are the ones who try to turn parties into social movements – the one thing Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Emmanuel Macron have in common. The trouble is that this can work for only so long.

The book is a wonderful read and contains much good sense. It is fond of the contrarian position, overfond perhaps. After all, behind the noise and fury of Twitter-era politics, real struggles of interests are still taking place. But what Runciman captures well is the sense of living in an age in which democracy is taken for granted and thus allowed to disintegrate from within. He goes further: it is not just that it is taken for granted, it is that the “battles are all won”. It is now the preferred political system of elderly populations muddling through, and this is hardly a recipe for restoring democracy’s lustre. If all that holds it in place is the sense that the alternatives are worse, then what happens when people no longer believe this to be the case?

The other books on which I hope to comment in future posts can all be accessed in full by clicking the link in the title -

- ”Homo Deus – a brief history of tomorrow” Y Harari (2016)

- ”21 Lessons for the 21st Century” Y Harari (2018)

- The Globotics Upheaval – globalisation, robotics and the future of work; Richard Baldwin (2019)

- ”Pax Technica – how the internet of things may set us free or lock us all up”; Philip Howard (2015)

-  ”The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it”; Yashka Mounk (2018)

The photo is the great vegetable market I have access to in what used to be the oil city of Ploiesti, Romania