DEMOCRACY IS DYING BY NATURAL CAUSES

Toward what, exactly, are we plunging? We feel that the momentum of events is carrying us down toward something dreadful. Is it a return to fascism? Or will our future look something more like the Eastern European present — illiberal democracy? Or is technology so rapidly inflecting our lives that democracy is likely to give way to thing for which we currently have no name? And who is “we”? Is that the United States, which alone among Western nations has placed an enemy of individual freedom in the highest office? Or will a wider view show us that much of Europe is heading in the same direction, such as Sunday’s election in Italy may show.

I have been reading the end-is-nigh books that the publishing industry has been pumping out recently like so many donuts. You’d have to go back more than a century, to the 15 years before World War I, to find another moment when so many leading thinkers questioned democracy’s future. But at the time, nations had not yet surrendered to ideological totalitarianism. Whatever America and the West might have been plunging toward then was much less terrifying than it is today.

The most obvious and dismal analogy to our current moment is 1933. 

There are parallels between those moments and our own. A German Jewish newspaper in the days after Hitler’s rise to power smugly rejecting the view that Hitler will do what he said he would do, since “a number of crucial factors hold power in check.” So many “reasonable people” think today, little reckoning how swiftly authoritarian leaders can turn on the very institutions that brought them to power.

We all think about 1933, of course. Isn’t that precisely the lesson of German acquiescence with Hitler’s rise? And just as Pascal argued that we’re better off betting on God’s existence than not, because the consequences are so much worse if we wrongly disbelieve than if we wrongly believe, so we’d be foolish to think, as the Germans did, “it can’t happen here.”

The problem with the Pascal analogy is that there are very real, and sometimes ruinous, consequences to betting on the unspeakable. To say “1933” is to say to the people who voted for Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen or Brexit, “You are brownshirts.” But that eliminates many options.

Is it really 1933? Donald Trump would plainly like to be an authoritarian, and some fraction of his supporters would egg him on if he began dismantling key institutions. Fortunately, Trump has neither a plan nor the evil gifts required to sustain one. What’s more, American institutions are far stronger than those of any European country in the 1930s. Levels of political violence are much lower. Countries like Egypt and Turkey look much more analogous to Germany between the wars, while the European countries that succumbed to fascism have built up powerful immunities against it: Look at French voters’ passionate reaffirmation of “republican” values in the face of Le Pen. Trump is never going to turn into Hitler. At the same time, Trump may represent something equally insidious, if less dramatic.

Insidious erosion is the leitmotif of How Democracies Die. But the story they tell is one of a sapping of faith slow enough that it may pass unnoticed at the time. Democracies have “gatekeeping” mechanisms that keep anti-democrats from power; think of the center-left/center-right coalitions that now fence out far-right parties in much of Western Europe. How do those mechanisms come to fail? In the United States, they write, the Constitution filtered the choice of a president through an electoral college made up of political leaders. That role passed to the parties, which kept out right-wing cranks like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. But party hierarchies began to collapse after the 1960s. In today’s Republican Party, the gatekeepers are Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham and the National Rifle Association. They filter cranks in, not out. In Europe, charismatic individuals can create parties of their own, as Emmanuel Macron, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and the Le Pen family did in France. In the United States, where the electoral rules disfavor third parties, such an individual can conquer a party from the outside — at least he can if it’s the Republican Party. The gates stand open.

In Democracy in America — written at a time when the prospects of American democracy looked a good deal rosier than they do today — Alexis de Tocqueville observes that laws do more to shape the American republic than do the accidental benefits of geography, but that “custom,” which he defines as “the various notions and opinions current among men,” whether in the sphere of religion or civic life, has more influence than either. The word we use today for that mass of unexamined opinion is “norms.” Functioning democracies depend on two norms: mutual tolerance and forbearance.

The first, and more obvious, entails according legitimacy to our opponents. The populist hatred for elites has made this principle feel as archaic as the code of the World War I flying ace; a remarkable number of people on the right really did believe that Hillary Clinton is Satan. Republicans have been mining this vein since the party was taken over more than two decades ago by Newt Gingrich, whose famed soundbite rhetoric inspired the 1990 “GOPAC memo,” which urged GOP legislative candidates to use language to highlight their “optimistic positive governing” — flag, family, child, jobs — and “contrasting” vocabulary for describing their Democratic rivals: anti-, betray, cheat, corrupt, punish. Should the 1933 meme become general on the left, mutual intolerance will reign supreme on all sides.

Forbearance is a more elusive idea; the principled decision not to use all the powers at one’s disposal — to eschew “constitutional hardball.” When forbearance fails, democratic restraint comes to seem quaint.

The failure of forbearance renders democracy increasingly nonfunctional, as it has with the rising use of the filibuster in Congress. The decision of Republican leaders in 2016 to refuse to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, constitutes an almost unprecedented breach of forbearance. And one failure inflames another, for a rival deemed illegitimate can hardly be afforded space to carry out his malevolent designs. Ultimately, the consequences may go far beyond gridlock.

This, then, is how democracies die: through the slow erosion of norms that underpin democratic institutions. Or perhaps we have the disease right, but the patient wrong. What does it mean to say that democracy is endangered when Donald Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice party were elected fair and square? Maybe the something that is dying is not “democracy.” Democracy, understood as a political system designed to assure majority rule, is doing just fine, indeed all too well; what is under threat are the values we have in mind when we speak of “liberal democracy.” 

What Populist parties in Europe have in common is an eagerness to seize on majoritarian mechanisms — above all, the ballot — in order to promote a vision hostile to individual rights, the rule of law, respect for political and ethnic minorities, and the willingness to seek complex solutions to complex problems. This is illiberal democracy. “Democracy without rights,” is both a reaction to, and a provocation for, “rights without democracy,” or “undemocratic liberalism”. Where majorities do not support liberal rights, or where it is reasonable to fear they won’t, elites create mechanisms, including judicial review, federal bureaucracies, international treaty bodies, that are only indirectly answerable to the public. 

How, then are we to think about the relationship between liberalism and democratic majorities?

Liberal principles are not intrinsically majoritarian. John Stuart Mill, the eminent Victorian liberal philosopher, never trusted the broad public to protect individual liberty, and thus was quite content with an electoral system that denied the franchise to nine-tenths or so of English adults. Yet in the 20th century Western nations became both liberal and democratic. Why, today, do we see these two principles delaminating? Liberal democracy flourished under three conditions: a mass media that filtered out extremism; broad economic growth and social mobility; and relative ethnic homogeneity. All three of those solid foundations have now crumbled away. And as they have done so, illiberal democracy and undemocratic liberalism have increasingly squared off against each other. The Brexit vote, to take only one example, posed liberal cosmopolites and European Union technocrats against “little Englanders” who longed for a world of vanished traditions and stable jobs. The time has come to reconsider the shibboleth that liberal democracies become “consolidated,” and are no longer at risk of backsliding, after two consecutive peaceful exchanges of power. Poland and Hungary are “deconsolidating” into illiberal democracies before our eyes.

I wonder if, in fact, failures of liberalism and of democracy are reinforcing each other. Determined minorities have increasingly learned how to prevent majorities from turning their will into legislation. In the United States, this takes the form of business interests or groups like the NRA using their financial muscle to block popular legislation, and to advance their own interests. In France, by contrast, unions have been able to paralyze the country in order to kill labor market reforms. The state’s inability to govern alienates citizens from government itself and fuels anti-system parties. Voters turn to a figure like Donald Trump who claims he can solve the problem by himself. Plainly, he can’t. And yet in France, Emmanuel Macron, another anti-system leader with “Jupiterian” tendencies, is fighting an epic battle to show that democratic mechanisms can lead to real economic and social change. So far, he’s winning — a rare ray of hope in the West.

Is the liberal democratic spirit subject to renewal? We say that it is because we cannot bear the thought otherwise. But maybe it’s not. Perhaps democracies, like all things made by men, are mortal objects that age and die. Twenty years ago, the journalist and historian Robert Kaplan set the bien-pensant world on its ear by writing an essay titled, “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” In fact, democracy was then gathering speed. But perhaps he was only premature.

While we scan the horizon for a new Luftwaffe, the ground is crumbling away beneath our feet. The coup d’état is now a strictly Third World affair; advanced democracies, by contrast, become endangered in the name of preserving democracy. Donald Trump’s supporters are quite sure that it is the liberal elite that is trying to steal democracy; they are trying to save it. 

Even if Trump is as dark a force we think he is, we’ll never have the clarity we need to fight the good fight because he and his followers will be busy defending democracy from us.

Western democracies have been sorely tested before whether in Europe in the 1930s or the United States in the populist era at the turn of the 20th century. But democracy was then young; the system had “slack”. Democracies could respond to economic crisis by growing new capacities for state intervention. Now, democracy is in “middle age.” The era of shape-shifting mutation lies in the past. If it is true, as Thomas Piketty argues in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that a brief and aberrational era of relative equality has now given way to the capitalist default of extreme inequality, does democracy have the capacity to change the rules in order to more justly distribute the fruits of enterprise? Probably not.

Perfectly rational citizens might choose an alternative to democracy. For example, today’s pragmatic, non-ideological authoritarianism offers “personal benefits” like shiny consumer products, and “collective dignity” in the form of aggressive nationalism. That accounts for the appeal of both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. What about “epistocracy,” or rule by the knowledgeable few? Much likelier in Mill’s era, Runciman concedes, than our own. Maybe democratic mechanisms will be taken over by the internet. Or perhaps, as all the machines in our lives learn to talk to one another, and come to treat us as just so much data, the whole idea of discrete selves, with their accompanying packet of individual liberties, will become obsolete, and we will say that democracy was not only just a moment, but an analog moment. 

Insofar as any or all of these observations are true, we must shed our end-of-history triumphalism for a more tragic sense of liberal democracy and its prospects. If, that is, inequality flourishes in conditions of peace, tolerance depends upon exclusion, or diversity undermines the commitment to liberalism, our deepest values will always be at odds with one another. Isaiah Berlin taught us that all good things do not and cannot go together, that liberalism thrives only amid a secular and skeptical pluralism; but the truth may be darker still. Perhaps every step forward requires at least half a step backward. Perhaps democratic majorities really will prove unappeasable without a real sacrifice of liberal values. That may be the destiny toward which we are plunging.

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James Traub is a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation, and author of the book "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit."