Before We Say ‘Democracy is Dying’ We Have to Know What it Is
Everyone likes to say democracy is dying. This started, in its last iteration, after 2016. I have been provoked to write about this by something Owen Jones has just written. But let me make a list to show you how an exciting literature emerged:
- In 2017 Paul Mason wrote in the Guardian that “democracy is dying”
- Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future (Viking, 2018)
- Harvard lecturer Yascha Mounk, now at Johns Hopkins, published The People versus Democracy (Harvard, 2018)
- Cambridge professor David Runciman, who was critical of Levitsky and Ziblatt, published How Democracy Ends (Profile, 2018)
- Chicago Professors Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq published How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (Chicago, 2020)
- Anne Applebaum published Twilight of Democracy (Allen Lane, 2020)
- Amazon reveals that there are other books such as How Social Movements Can Save Democracy by sociologist Donatella della Porta (Polity, 2020), How Democracies Live by Stein Ringen (Chicago, 2022), Can Schools Save Democracy by Michael Feuer (Johns Hopkins, 2023), How to Save Democracy: Advice and Inspiration from 95 World Leaders edited by Eli Merritt (Amplify, 2023), Common Sense to Save Democracy by a lawyer Steve Kramer (Palmetto, 2024)
- Anne Applebaum goes for it again with Autocracy Inc (Allen Lane, 2024)
It’s all about ‘rising authoritarianism’, ‘populism’ and the ‘erosion of norms’. Runciman offers the subtlest analysis, suggesting that democracy promises two things: dignity (since we are adequately represented, feel we have a say etc.) and results (policies that solve actual problems); and he suggested that these are falling apart. Democracy only seems to be able to do one if it ignores the other. For instance, it solves problems (COVID-19) if it ignores the voice of the people.
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Tempting to invoke the Dead Parrot sketch, but let’s just say as a first time voter half a century ago, I naively saw elected representatives as, at best, capable people voted in to excercise good judgement on behalf of the electorate.
Witness the great liberalising private-member bills of the late 1960s – death penalty ended, abortion and homosexuality de-criminalised.
How times change. Democracy not dead but disconnected. I hold accountable “Education, Education, Education.”
Too much teaching what to think, not enough teaching how to think.
All too complicated for me. What I understand by the word “democracy” is a system of government where the people get to choose who is in government. There are variants in terms of whether the government’s powers are notionally limited by a constitution (e.g. the US) or not (arguably the UK).
You can’t have a meaningful democracy without freedom of speech and information, so to that extent it is certainly under strong attack in many countries. I think for it to work well, the people need to be engaged, but if the people are content and don’t care much, well that is also a choice.
I think the recent US elections suggest rather that democracy is getting stronger.
A candidate and his team won despite being outspent by almost a factor of 3, by harnessing the power of social media to communicate with people directly. And communicating not just in one direction but openly on platforms that incorporate cross-examination. That requires candidates who can think, and who can defend their ideas against real questions. Candidates who have the desire and the ability to direct their departments to follow the will of the electorate.
That sounds more democratic than the current practise of having politicians who are (so obviously just) figure-heads, with all the decisions being made by faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats. Where communication to the populace is via mind-numbing ‘interviews’ by partisan numbskulls. Where politicians are such low-grade intellects that they need to rely on censorship to avoid being exposed as charlatans. /rant
Demos and Kratos. People and power. Voting covers the people bit but as for power? We currently have the Student Union government that has lied massively to win power and just what can the people do about it? Nothing. What is missing is a power of recall where the people can subject MPs to another vote for lying. Greater use of referenda would give us more power. Who can argue that the EU Referendum was a rare exercise in democracy in this country.
That was just another acclamative procedure: Cameron agreed to hold a EU referendum to get his own party to accept the LibDems as coalition partner. Hence, a referendum was duly drawn up and presented as yes/no choice to the so-called electorate. People would need to be able to create proposals to be voted on for them to have any real influence over politics, not just the ‘right’ to vote on proposals laid before them by the political class.
OTOH, is this necessarily a good thing? As Dr Alexander pointed out in the article, democracy became something like a political fetish in the 19th century. Since then, everybody claims to be The Sole True Democrat™ (as opposed to all his political competitors). How about striving for good government instead of popular government? I don’t think my neighbours with all their petty grievances are particularly qualified to make big decisions for the future of the whole country and for that matter, neither am I.
Elective oligarchy is heading towards an appropriate description. But it still overstates the influence of the so-called electorate. Acclamative oligarchy is a better. Politicians are typically professionals with the present crop of politicians ‘growing’ their successors by weeding out party members. The general populace is not meaningfully involved in this procedure, ie, it can’t chose or reject politicians. In order to prepare for elections, groups of related politicians create policy proposals (“party manifestos”), something the general populace has no say on, either. It can neither create policy proposals of its own nor reject individual parts of a bundle of policy proposals. During a so-called election competing sets of politicians with associated, competing policy proposal bundles are laid before the electorate which can accept or reject them en bloc only, that is, they can clap there hands/ bang some pots when a politicians/ proposal bundle bundle is presented to them or not. The politicians whose politicians/ proposal bundle bundle gets the most acclamation then become government. As they’re now able to govern, they can implement whichever policy choices the want regardless of these being part of the original proposal bundle which got the acclamation. The electorate may watch this and fume… Read more »
Yes but the point is that as long as they pretend to believe in democracy and the consent of the governed and don’t rip the arse out of it with autocracy and theft of taxes, it kinda works.
The political class in Europe and the Anglosphere have forgotten that vital fact.
The USA on Nov 5th remembered it, and indeed the good news is spreading.
My hunch is that across the civilized world the political landscape in 5 years’ time will look quite different.
Since the (enforced) demise of the monarchs by grace of God, every ruler pretends to do so based on the consent of the people and by-and-large, this is even true: Most people will tacitly consent to anything which enables them to lead their own lives mostly undisturbed, even if this means that their neighbours might be shipped to Gulags to starve to death there.
Nevertheless, our system of representatives of their respective parties governing in a vacuum they’re free to will with whatever they desire to put into it isn’t really democratic and I don’t think it’s a particularly good system of government, either.
As this sort-of fits in here: A link to a typical specimen of the kind of stories supposed to motivate the pot-banging serf to bang pots:
Extremely dangerous, satanic Nazi terrorists on the rampage, terror experts warn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w5rkzxjl4o
If you believe that, your pots must be well-used.
Democracy isn’t dying because it never lived.
Democracy (Demos Kratos) equal distribution of political power (kratos) throughout the population (demos) so that it is not concentrated in one place, in order to avoid tyranny.
Representation, voting, political tribes = tyranny of the majority, or these days tyranny of a coalition of minorities and cronies in cahoots with the political class.
This is not “democracy” and if what we “free”, “democratic” Nations have is “democracy” – why are we in such a state with the gap between our Governments and authoritarian regimes vanishingly small?
And then there is the effective coalition between a variety of international standards, promulgated by professional institutions, including financial ones. Governments might influence them to some extent, but are down the ladder a bit globally. After all, what I’m using right now was probably designed in America and made in Chine.
Demos means the population collectively, as constituting a society. This is subtly different from being merely the aggregation of individuals that comprise that society. The equal distribution of political power throughout the population is correctly known as isocracy. A small community (e.g. a kibbutz) can be isocratic. Clearly a nation of millions cannot.
Democracy is an ideal more than a practical way to run a state.
First, one has to decide what the state should do, what it is actually for. That in itself is a massive unending question.
In my view, the answer is the less the better. But others think the opposite, that it should pretty much fix every problem known to man.
Then one has to decide how to accomplish that. Pretty hard if we can’t agree on the first.
Lastly, we would need to agree on who should be in charge.of this enterprise.
Our current system limits us to the last question.
Which is why I don’t bother voting or feel I have much to say in the matter. The.first two are pretty much given. And in my case I am in total disagreement with what has been predetermined, so, it’s a completely pointless exercise. I couldn’t care less who runs the modern day prison we all call the nation state.
Re: Democracy. Democracy is a perfectly practical way to run a state, at least insofar it names the way the Athenian state was organized. That’s principally as follows: All citizens are eligible for all public offices. Public officials are selected from candidates who have volunteered for that by the lot or – as a special case – by vote of the popular assembly for generals (war leaders). All citizens are allowed to propose policies to the popular assembly or to speak in front if it when proposed policies are being discussed. Policy proposals are adopted if the popular assembly approves of them via vote. One should, however, take into account that a sizable part of the population of Athens were slaves and so-called metics, citizens of other Greek states. Members of these groups were responsible for quite a bit of the necessary everyday work and had no political rights, making democracy a bit of a luxury lifestyle choice of a privileged group of people with no overburdening other occupations. Whether or not such a political system is practial for a state that’s significantly larger than a single city is debatable. And it’s certainly not the system employed by our so-called… Read more »
Re: What … ? I think you presenting a false dichotomy here. Freedom of citizens necessarily ends at the point were the state interferes with their lives in order to make them do something they otherwise possibly wouldn’t want to do (or to prevent them from doing something they might want to do). As our society is supposed to be a free society, everybody agrees that the state should do as little as sensibly possible. The great disagreement is about what is or isn’t sensibly possible in this respect. For a practical example: The COVID state mandated universal face masking to support the freedom of all its citizens to move about as they saw fit without running the risk of exposing themselves to lethal germs. What I’m trying to get at is that the scope of state action/ intervention has no inherent boundaries. It’s really the set of all things presently considered to be sensible for the state to do and this set keeps changing, based on the answers to three fundamentally political questions: Is XY an issue? Should we do something about XY provided it’s an issue? What can we do about it, provided 2 was answered in the… Read more »
Like all else in the universe and life ‘democracy’ is evolving. It is not absolute but dependent on the interaction of many underlying social forces. This is not how it dies but how it lives. Hence, the neoliberals have their view of democracy and treat ‘populism’ (another view) as the ‘wrong type of democracy’, so they try hard with laws, derogatory rhetoric, control of information, to marginalise and stop it. However, the neoliberals have also over-reached such that it is now they who come across as being autocratic. Hence, the rise of alternative forms of ‘democracy’, whose time has now arrived.
I suppose we would have a semblance of democracy if politicians were able to tell the truth. They are so accustomed to lying that when they do tell the truth nobody believes them. The politician lawyers then make laws which they then let their lawyer friends enforce. In any other field this would be a conflict of interest. Then they create quangos which they hide behind in order to avoid doing anything remotely democratic. The biggest quangos being international bodies. On top of this the “opposition” pretend to oppose when they are just playing a game for the sake of it. The best example I can think of at the moment is the duplicitous way Blair pushed through university fees which the Tories opposed at the time only for the Tories to increase them. So everything is hidden behind legal cloaks created by politicians. But at least we ourselves can pretend to oppose them by electing the other bunch of liars. Perhaps we need a new unencumbered political party to sweep this lot away. We need an outsider, perhaps our cousins across the pond have lived up to their revolutionary ways and after a term of insanity with Irish Joe… Read more »
Gosh, populism – what an awful way to run democracy, by electing people who actually say they’ll do what the majority of people want, when what the people want is what the liberal elite decide that they need.
Great piece (as so often from this writer), Of course it’s true – democracy is a trick of presentation. It’s a system for enabling despots (or teams of despots) to replace each other in the top spot, without the bloodshed of earlier times.
The system is “democracy” when you are in favour of the change and “populism” when you are not.