Are we living through the end of the democratic moment in history? Democracy, so recently acquired, less than two centuries old at the uttermost and still not available to a large portion of the world’s population, is under pressure, and faith in it is being lost.
There are four main reasons why this is so.
One is that it is not delivering enough for people’s aspirations and needs, but has become trapped in political divisions and partisanships that reduce its responsiveness to social and economic diversities. Political culture has become a swamp of destabilising polarisation, quarrels, untruth and propaganda, infecting the credibility of government and alienating populaces.
The second is that multinational business lies outside the powers of single states and causes harm that democracy cannot control. Particularly over the last half-century, capitalism has produced entities too large and powerful for national governments to constrain, and its profit imperatives relentlessly drive environmental and human depredations that make citizenries despair of remedy; so they blame their own polities’ system.
The third is that the post WWII model for how society is best run no longer persuades, with China and other similarly-structured polities as, for too many in politics and business, an attractive alternative model.
The fourth is that there is deliberate externally-driven undermining of democracies by anti-democracies, employing interference, misinformation and propaganda, powered by the new technologies of mass and targeted communication.
I am writing a book about these challenges to democracy, and proposing solutions.
Saving democracy matters because its benefits, obscured by these challenges, are too important to lose. These benefits are taken for granted to such an extent that they have become nigh invisible to their beneficiaries. Even though there are few places where ‘true’ democracy exists – most democracies are elective oligarchies, at best ‘near-democracies’ – their general conformity to principles of the rule of law, civil liberties and individual rights is a precious achievement, historically very recent and hard-won. Inattention to the practical value of this achievement, and chronic disaffection with governments over matters of immediate economic and social significance within election cycles, blinds people to what they stand to lose if democracy fails.
Matters have reached such a point that even some of the virtues of democracy are perceived as failings. Democracies are noisy because of debate, argument, criticism, differences of opinion over alternative courses of action. When these turn toxic, as they have done especially over the last decade, they seem full of endless trouble, even tumult. By contrast tyrannies are silent, without political strife and disagreement. But tyrannies are silent as wastelands are silent: wastelands of rights and liberties, where debate and criticism are not allowed, dissent crushed, the population a conscript army in service to a cabal or an individual. In democracies individual rights and liberties are bought at the cost of noisy striving. The false desire for peace – for a cessation of the noise and relief from the tiring responsibility to engage – makes the apparent order of an authoritarian dispensation attractive. This has become the more so because the prime example of such a dispensation, the People’s Republic of China, has learned to hide actual police suppression under a bread-and-circuses, consumerist, modernised-seeming cloak enabled by high levels of economic growth which, for many, suffices. For not only does such an arrangement distract from the absence of fundamental freedoms, but makes many people actively opposed to seeking such freedoms if doing so means effort and trouble. For if one conforms and obeys one can safely, even happily, get on with life, enjoying the standard of living achieved; who needs a right to express opinions about government when one’s economic basics are all right? Such is the thought.
Passivity of this kind might be attractive at the individual level, but conformism, suppression of alternative views, hostility to innovation and creativity (except in the technologies that serve the economy: these of course are encouraged), absence of debate, denial of intellectual freedom and artistic expression which challenges norms, results in a stultified, static, monochrome society, whose shallowness and banality crushes the spirit of anyone not insensible to the thought that because human flourishing – in any sense other than economic security – is a highly various matter, individual freedom matters. For all the failings and difficulties of democracies otherwise, they largely succeed in protecting individual freedoms, whose price is far beyond all that is provided by the false peace of passivity and the absence of onerous responsibilities to think, choose and participate.
It is said that ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance’; this might better be adjusted to ‘the price of liberty is eternal engagement’. In authoritarian dispensations the message is: ‘Don’t bother your heads with matters of government, and anyway if you do you will be locked up’. In democracies the message is (should be): ‘Bother your heads with government, because if you don’t you will be oppressively, and in crucial respects badly, ruled over against your will’. The fact that too many cannot be bothered in the required way gives an invitation to those who wish to replace democracy with authoritarian government, so that the bothered become bothered enough, one last time, to vote for their gaolers – which, in essence, is the story of populism, the movement that seeks to make a ‘one last time’ use of democracy to destroy democracy.