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.
I start with coups – the standard markers of democratic failure – to ask whether an armed
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.
Next I explore the risk of catastrophe. Democracy will fail if everything else falls apart: nuclear war,
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?Then I discuss the possibility of technological takeover. Intelligent robots are still some way off.
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?
Finally, I ask whether it makes sense to look to replace democracy with something better.
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.
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