The Twilight of Democracy
It is no exaggeration to observe that democracy is under attack throughout the world where there is some form of representative government that claims to be democratic. Putting aside the bruising of democratic norms over the past four years, the US Congress has for many years ceased to make any serious effort to represent the desires of their constituencies, and the gap that has opened between the modestly left and the far right has made examples of genuine debate and deliberation few and far between, offering instead a kind of ideological kabuki theater.
The United States is hardly alone in this development. Traditional political parties across the established democracies of Europe are losing ground to new extreme right anti-democratic forces: the Freedom Party in Austria, the Danish People’s Party, the AfD in Germany, the Lega Nord in Italy, the National Rally in France, the Swedish Democrats, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Several have become the second largest parties in their countries, which does not bode well for the future of liberal democracy even in those countries that are most successful economically. So far, these insurgent forces have been held at bay by traditional forces of authority, but how long this can last is uncertain.
In the less established democracies in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, authoritarian leaders are being elected despite their open contempt for the democratic processes that are bringing them to power — Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Andrzej Duda in Poland, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. The painful experience with authoritarian communism in Eastern Europe and military dictatorship in Brazil seems to provide little stay against these developments. Further, the success of authoritarian government in China in lifting over a billion people from desperate poverty, the reemergence of a remilitarized Russia as a force in European politics, lends encouragement to these anti-democratic forces.
There has been a flood of critical analyses of these developments with titles such as How Democracies Die (Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, 2018), How Democracy Ends (David Runciman, 2018), Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (Larry Diamond, 2019), and The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Bruce Ackerman, 2010), which predicted the equivalent of the Trump presidency with uncanny accuracy. Many of these books are brilliant in their analyses of what has gone wrong structurally with contemporary democracy and constitute powerful warnings about the state of affairs in the United States and around the world. What they generally lack, however, is useful advice about what is to be done to restore faith in and the actuality of liberal democracy.
Here are some ideas from Roslyn Fuller's book In Defence of Democracy (2019):
First is the shift to online discussion and voting, and with it the possibility of mass participation. Here she discusses already-existing software and offers examples, ranging from participatory budgeting in Reykjavik to the Pirate Party and the Five-Star Movement in Europe, which use software to develop policy from the bottom up.
Second is pay for participation to level the playing field between those with the financial means to have time to vote and those struggling to maintain themselves.
Third is “focused, outcome-oriented deliberation.” Fuller acknowledges that social media platforms and various news sites have “all too often become the new arenas for […] petty, mudslinging, back-biting wars of attrition” and that for direct democracy to be genuinely deliberative will take carefully controlled media platforms that set limits on debate and point always toward arriving at conclusions.
Her hope is that if the other elements of direct democracy were put in place, equivalent articulate and able individuals would emerge to help lead the process of direct democracy. Whether one accepts this presumption depends on just how rational one takes the average voter to be.
Fuller summarizes her thoughts by stating “We need a new generation of politicians who can create a positive vision of what democracy can do. A citizenry responds to challenge—like that posed by John Kennedy’s legendary speech in 1962 to America: ‘ We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard."
Ed Cardon
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