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”.
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 -
