Democracy
has been on the skids for some time - but it took the events of 2016 (Brexit; Trump)
to disturb people from their deep slumber. I remember an article in 2003 by Rene Cuperus
which warned of the serious decline in party membership in Europe; noted the beginning (in the Netherlands) of what became known as populism; and
ended with an observation made by Ralf
Dahrendorf that same year that
many people were losing faith in elections; voters no longer
trusted political parties (“the party game is becoming a minority sport”);
party programmes based on ideology had lost much of their strength; and the
people no longer view parliament as a representation of themselves and entitled
to take decisions on their behalf. Dahrendorf concluded: “Everybody who values freedom should put reconsidering democracy and its
institutions at the top of their agenda.”
Making amends for the silence of the past 15 or so years, there has been a flood since 2017 of books about the breakdown of liberal democracy starting with Eatwell and Goodwin’s little Pelican book National Populism – the revolt against liberal democracy (2017) which inspired a post (and great reading list) almost 2 years ago to the effect that -
- Talk of “populism” seems
to surface whenever things seem to be slipping from the control of “ruling
elites”
- Such talk has
occurred every 30 years or so in the past 150 years – the
1880s in the US and Russia; the 1930s in Europe and Latin America;
the late
1960s globally; the start of the new millennium in Europe
- as a professional and intellectual discipline, Political Science has adopted
a rather disdainful view of democracy and a “scientist” approach to its
methodology - marginalising those few academics with serious interests in
notions of the “public good” being embedded in government programmes
- The US tradition of
populism has never died - whereas the European tradition is sceptical at best
(with the exception of the French whose celebration of revolt seems part of
their DNA)
- But the younger
contemporary American academics seem to have lost their sense of history and
have produced rather aggressive celebrations of liberalism
The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it by Yascha Mounk (2018) was the book I had in mind when I wrote the last comment. I have to confess I have shunned the book until now - on the basis that I couldn’t trust anything written by someone who had, for several years, been the Director of a Tony Blair-funded ThinkTank.
But a reference to Polish philosopher
and MEP’s Ryszard Legutko’s “The Demon in Democracy - totalitarian
temptations in free societies”
(2018 Eng – 2016 Polish version) had piqued my interest last month.
I
had the same sense while reading
“The Demon in Democracy” - with the
important difference that Legutko’s thesis is much more aggressive than I
recall my catholic discussant’s of sixty years ago. He makes little attempt at
a defence of traditional values - but rather launches a ruthless onslaught on the
“liberal democracy” embodied in modern progressivism.
Basically he argues that “liberal democracy” has the same dangerous and universalist utopianism as that of communism; and that he should know because he’s lived under both regimes….One review of the book caught the argument well, I felt, with this summary
In pre-liberal society, the burden of proof was on the
reformers to show why their proposals would make their society better, not on
the conservatives to show why the existing arrangement was good. The mere existence
of a given social hierarchy meant it had existed for some time and this meant
that great care and caution had to be applied in determining whether its reform
was prudent. This cautious attitude toward reform was the by-product of an
understanding of society as something that man did not construct and hence as
something man could not simply reconstruct. Society and the inequalities with
which it is coeval (Legutko mentions family, schools, and churches as
manifestations of these inequalities) are, at their most fundamental level,
inheritances man cannot fully grasp and before which he stands largely in awe.
In modern liberal-democratic society, by contrast, every
institution must increasingly justify itself before the standard of equality if
it is to retain its legitimacy, whether legal or social. But because inequality
inheres in the very nature of society, there will always be hierarchies to
level in the eyes of the liberal-democratic egalitarian.
Indeed, it would seem that the more the cause of liberal-democratic
equality progresses, the more indignantly the remaining instances of inequality
are felt. Thus “equality resembles a
monster with an insatiable appetite: regardless of how much it has eaten, the
more it devours, the hungrier it becomes.”
It’s the way I reacted in
cinemas at the end of a film in the 1950s when the strains of “God Save the
Queen” started. I would sit….ostentatiously….Or these days….with any Brit not
sporting a poppy in November being considered persona non grata…..
To
be continued…..
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/unpalatable-truths.html
The
Demons of Liberal Democracy; Adrian Pabst (2019) I think the similarity of
the title is coincidental
Colin Crouch on Ralf Dahrendorf;
http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/samuel-moyn-mark-lilla-and-crisis-liberalism
https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/zombie-liberalism/
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