How do democracies die?
The old question has a new urgency because global surveys are everywhere reporting dipping confidence in democracy and marked jumps in citizens’ frustrations with government corruption, broken promises and chronic incompetence. Young people are the least satisfied with democracy – much more disaffected than previous generations at the same age. Highly worrying are the survey findings for India, once described as the world’s largest democracy and now fast developing a reputation as the world’s largest failing democracy. In its Democracy Report 2020, Sweden’s V-Dem Institute noted that India ‘has almost lost its status as a democracy’. It ranked India below Sierra Leone, Guatemala and Hungary. Equally worrying is the case of the world’s most powerful democracy. V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2021 now ranks the United States as a major contributor to an ‘accelerating wave of autocratization’ engulfing 25 countries, alongside Brazil, Turkey, Poland, Benin, Bolivia, and Mauritius.
Things are serious. Not since the 1920s and 1930s has democracy faced so much political trouble. The Shortest History of Democracy (2022) notes how that period saw the destruction of most parliamentary democracies. A mere dozen survived. Since then, political scientists have pointed out, democracies have wilted and been destroyed in two connected ways. Some have suffered sudden death, in puffs of smoke and rat-a-tat gunfire. The overthrow of a caretaker Greek government on the eve of elections (in 1967) by a regime led by colonels and the 1973 military coup d’état against the Allende government in Chile count as well-known examples. Many observers are interpreting the events of January 6th 2022 in the United States in this way: as an organised violent attack on the Capitol that was part of a broader scheme to overturn an election result, directed from the top by a defeated president and his buddies.
One weakness of this particular ‘catastrophist’ interpretation of how democide happens is that the death of democracy by gradual cuts is more common. Democide is usually a slow-motion and messy process. Wild rumours and talk of conspiracies flourish. Street protests and outbreaks of uncontrolled violence happen. Fears of civil unrest spread. The armed forces grow agitated. Emergency rule is declared but things eventually come to the boil. As the government totters, the army moves from its barracks onto the streets to quell unrest and take control. Democracy is finally buried in a grave it slowly dug for itself. This is what happened in Burkina Faso earlier this year. Amidst gunfire, following a lengthy period of government paralysis fed by rumours and rebellion, the so-named Patriotic Movement for Safeguarding and Restoration seized control of the country. During the past generation, around three-quarters of democracies and failing power-sharing governments met their end in this slow-motion way. The military coup d’états against the elected governments of Egypt (2013), Thailand (2014), Myanmar and Tunisia (2021), and Chad, Mali, Guinea and Sudan (2021) are obvious examples.
The Chilean coup d’état, September 11th,1973: the military attack on Santiago’s La Moneda, the presidential palace where Salvador Allende, refusing to resign his elected office, delivered a farewell speech on radio before taking his own life.
Less obvious is the way democracies are gradually destroyed by social deprivation and decay. Think of things this way: democracy is much more than pressing a button or marking a box on a ballot paper. It goes beyond the mathematical certitude of election results and majority rule. It’s not reducible to lawful rule through independent courts or attending local public meetings and watching breaking news stories scrawled across a screen. Democracy is a whole way life guided by a spirit of equality.
My book with Debasish Roy Chowdhury, To Kill A Democracy (2021), reminds readers of a truism that was mostly forgotten during the past few decades dominated by the presumptions and prejudices of neo-liberalism: power-sharing democratic institutions cannot flourish unless people enjoy generous and equal measures of security and dignity in their daily lives. Democracy is a mode of life marked by freedom from hunger, humiliation and violence. Democracy is public disgust for callous employers who maltreat workers paid a pittance for unblocking stinking sewers and scraping shit from latrines. Democracy is saying no to every form of human and non-human indignity. It is respect for women, tenderness with children, and access to jobs that bring satisfaction and sufficient reward to live comfortably.
In a healthy democracy, citizens are not forced to travel in buses and trains like livestock, wade through dirty water from overrunning sewers, or breathe poisonous air. Democracy is public and private respect for different ways of living. The French scholar Marcel Gauchet is wrong. His view that the decline of religion now requires democracies to imbibe their citizens with a common culture forgets that a pluriverse of different identities and respect for others’ beliefs are hallmarks of a successful democracy. In the language of Emile Durkheim’s classic The Division of Labour in Modern Society (1893), robust democracies reject the ‘mechanical solidarity’ of undifferentiated social life bound together by a dominant way of seeing the world. They instead favour complex forms of ‘organic solidarity’ through which people depend upon others and rub along because they agree to disagree as well as accept the advantages of differentiation. In this sense, democracy implies humility: the willingness to admit that in the end nobody is invincible, and that ordinary lives are never ordinary. Democracy is mutual recognition and equal respect: equal access to decent medical care and sympathy for those who have fallen behind. And it’s the rejection of the dogma that things can’t be changed because they’re ‘naturally’ fixed in stone. Democracy is the friend of contingency. It is thus insubordination: the personal and collective refusal to put up with everyday forms of snobbery and toad-eating, idolatry and lying, bullshit and bullying.
Fine principles, you may say, but what happens to a democracy when successive governments allow their social footings to be damaged, or destroyed? The shortest answer: democracy suffers a slow-motion social death.
Especially when a written constitution promises its citizens justice, liberty and equality, the splintering and shattering of social life induce a sense of legal powerlessness among citizens. The judiciary becomes vulnerable to cynicism, political meddling and state capture. Massive imbalances of wealth, chronic violence, famine, rotten health care and unevenly distributed life chances also make a mockery of the ethical principle that in a democracy people can live as citizen partners of equal social worth. If democracy is the self-government of social equals who freely choose their representatives, then large-scale social suffering renders the democratic principle utterly utopian. Or it turns into a grotesque farce.
Domestic violence, poor health care, widespread feelings of social unhappiness, and daily shortages of food and housing destroy people’s dignity. Dignity is a precious democratic virtue: it is the right of people to be themselves freely through others, the sense that their lives matter. Their opposite, indignity, is a form of generalised social violence. It kills the spirit and substance of democracy. It renders people invisible. Their lives feel formless, and without substance. When famished children cry themselves to sleep at night, when millions of women feel unsafe and multitudes of migrant workers living on slave wages are forced to flee for their lives in a medical emergency, the victims are unlikely to believe themselves worthy of rights, or capable as citizens of fighting for their own entitlements, or for the rights of others. Ground down by social indignity, the powerless are robbed of self-esteem.
No doubt, citizens’ ability to strike back, to deliver millions of mutinies against the rich and powerful, is in principle never to be underestimated in a democracy. But the brute fact is social indignity undermines citizens’ capacity to take an active interest in public affairs, and to check and humble and wallop the powerful. Citizens are forced to put up with state and corporate restrictions on basic public freedoms. They must get used to big money, surveillance, pepper spray and baton charges, preventive detentions, police harassment and police killings.
But the scandal doesn’t end there. For when millions of citizens are daily victimised by social indignities, the powerful are in effect granted a licence to rule arbitrarily. Millions of humiliated people become sitting targets. Some at the bottom and many in the middle and upper classes turn their backs on public affairs. They bellyache in unison against politicians and politics. But the disaffected do nothing. Complacency and cynical indifference breed voluntary servitude. Or the disgruntled begin to yearn for political redeemers and steel-fisted government. Ressentiment (Max Scheler) puts a curse on democracy. Seething with feelings of envy, hatred and revenge, the powerless and the privileged join hands to wish for a messiah who promises to defend the poor, protect the rich, drive out the demons of corruption and disorder, and purify the soul of ‘the people’.
El demagogo (1946), by the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco (1883 - 1949)
When this happens, demagoguery comes into season. Citizen disempowerment encourages boasting and bluster among narcissistic leaders - Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Jacob Zuma - who care little for the niceties of public integrity and power-sharing. These populist redeemers (Enrique Krauze) grow convinced they can turn lead into gold. But their hubris has political costs. When democratically elected governments cease to be held accountable by a society weakened by poor health, low morale, and joblessness, demagogues are prone to blindness and ineptitude. They make careless, foolish, and incompetent decisions that reinforce social inequities. They license big market and government players - poligarchs - to decide things. Those who exercise power in government ministries, corporations, and public/private projects aren’t subject to democratic rules of public accountability. Like weeds in an untended garden, political favouritism and corruption flourishes. Access to basic public services is rationed. The powerful stop caring about the niceties of public integrity. Institutional democracy failure happens.
Finally, in the absence of redistributive public welfare policies that guarantee sufficient food, shelter, security, education, health care and dignity to the downtrodden, democracy morphs into a mere façade. Elections still happen and there’s abundant talk of ‘the people’. But democracy begins to resemble a fancy mask worn by wealthy political predators. Self-government is killed. Strong-armed rule by rich and powerful poligarchs in the name of ‘the people’ follows. Police crackdowns of protesters become normal. Rumours and false information multiply. Cheer-led by lapdog media, phantom democracy becomes a reality. Civil society is broken and subordinated to a strong-armed state. People are expected to behave as loyal subjects, or else suffer the consequences. A thoroughly 21st century type of top-down rule called despotism triumphs – as it did in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet empire, and as might still happen in a United States ruled by a narcissistic demagogue with an insatiable thirst for unaccountable power and a huge following of disappointed and disgruntled people determined to dig in their heels and defend their place in the world.
A brief, brilliant and spot-on essay, John!