In which a concerned citizen gets around to reading a couple of books on democracy.
1.
Sensible people who favor democracy can agree on what an authoritarian is. What they may not agree on is a solution for protecting democracy. Or what they mean by democracy. That was what I thought after reading Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracy Dies (2018). The writers are in favor of democracy - but not too much of it. "Gatekeeping," one of the key terms of the book, is the process of filtering out unsuitable candidates for higher office before they can be voted into power. Going back to Alexander Hamilton and the origin of the Electoral College, they acknowledge that it's arguably not so democratic for candidates to be handpicked for voters through backroom wheeling and dealing but ultimately stand by that system as the best of bad options. Henry Ford, a wealthy businessman (the Ford in Ford Motor Company), widely admired for his rags-to-riches tale, had a vanity publication he used to spread antisemitic ravings. Hitler was an admirer. The Nazis later awarded him with a medal. In the 1920s, his name surfaced as a potential presidential candidate and, despite having no experience in public office, garnered enough support among voters to give him a shot. But the gatekeepers refused to take him seriously, putting an end to his campaign before it started. Then there was the popularity of Joe McCarthy, which peaked at around 40%, the same as Trump. Levitsky and Ziblatt emphasize that a functioning democracy is one that has some protection from the people.
But, after the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention, the primaries were made binding, weakening that protection. The writers praise Democrats for a change that came soon after to retain the gatekeeping function: superdelegates. Republicans, on the other hand, held on to the too-democratic primary system, leaving the gate wide open for the candidate they call the modern Henry Ford. Other contributing factors to democratic regression should be well known to anyone who's followed politics closely for even the last year or so. If not, here it is in one place: Racism. The changed media landscape that profits handsomely by serving up whatever interpretation of reality people want to hear, warping them, making them more susceptible to extremist views, reducing common ground. Rightwing politicians like Newt Gingrich, who devised and distributed an outline for attacking the opposition with inflammatory language, or like Tom DeLay, who encouraged his fellow Republicans to do anything that wasn't illegal to gain an advantage. The Supreme Court. Laws aren't enough, they say. Politicians in a democracy must be committed to democracy, compromise even if it means their party suffers a temporary setback, and uphold standards of conduct.
No constructive answer is provided for how to get them to ignore the incentives to break these rules. As for restoring the gatekeepers to power, I see no reason why people would forfeit the right to choose candidates once given it, or that much of anything can be kept behind closed doors in the age of the internet and social media and camera phones. The book's argument is neat and simple and appeals to the US citizen's fear and anger with thoughts that were readily available when the book was first published. It's written as a warning but, more accurately, it's written as a warning to those in power. In this discussion of democracy, the average citizen is abstract victim, nuisance, or threat, not rightful participant. And so I take my business elsewhere.
2.
Recommendations
Among the reviews of How Democracy Dies, I found one in the Guardian by a writer, Cambridge professor, and podcast host named David Runciman. He criticizes it for having "remarkably little" to say about why people are discontented with democracy. His conclusion:
This is a provocative and readable book, but in the end it is also an unsatisfying one. It shares the weakness of too much contemporary political science, by treating history as a useful guide to the future, despite the paucity of the dataset, the superficiality of much of the evidence, and the long track record we have of being surprised by what comes next. I say this as a historian: if we want to know how our democracies might die, we have to stop looking to our yesterdays.
Then I encountered a couple of recommendations in two other publications: David Runciman, David Runciman. Finally I discovered David Runciman in the "Democracy" section of my reading list, added I don't remember when. ...David Runciman? I ordered a book of his called How Democracy Ends (from the same year, 2018).
The first compliment I'll pay to the book is this: how democracy ends, appropriately enough, defies easy summary. In the time since I finished, I've felt daunted about returning to my notes, which include pages and pages of rather long, quoted passages, to give an accurate sense of where he stands and why. There are writers for whom "nuance" means subjecting the reader to endless lectures to grasp every last strand of a thought, which can be doubly damaging if the thought isn't worth it (if the reader hasn't already hanged herself by the time the strands are all gathered). Runciman is a nuanced thinker, in mild, pithy, aphoristic style. He establishes his position drawing from a wider range of sources than Levitsky and Ziblatt, boosting the force of his argument, and confronting the counterarguments to it in the same manner, as Levitsky and Ziblatt neglect to do. He takes care to make distinctions between forms of government and historical moments. He's thorough as he covers much ground. As a result, it's almost three books for the price of one that read like one, too. The fatigue it causes is the ideal kind, frequently paying off by uncovering the molten core of a crucial idea. A daunting but worthwhile challenge to lay out what Runciman thinks because of how he thinks.
(Although both books are equally a letdown in the area of linguistic flavor, which I'm not sure is a feature of political science writing generally. Runciman's opening sentence: "Nothing lasts forever." I omit my quip. Elsewhere: someone is swatted like a fly and people have other fish to fry and people throw up their arms in despair and the forest can't be seen for the trees. And I choose to forget his clangorous, if infrequent, use of exclamation points.)
His interest is in examining the threats not just to any democracy but to democracies such as ours, ones in middle age, with a long history of peaceful transfers of power and resisting total collapse, experiencing a "midlife crisis." The threats he weighs are coups, catastrophes, and technological takeover.
On Coups
One thing that separates Runciman from Levitsky and Ziblatt, as well as many contemporary writers on politics, is that he's not convinced Trump is capable of destroying US democracy. He uses an example of another democratic collapse of the 20th century, in 1960s Greece. One day, incited by US intelligence, the military announced it was taking over. They had the guns. They seized control of sources of information. And they took over. This is a story that would have fit in How Democracy Dies except Runciman makes a different point: At the time, Greece's democracy was relatively young, foundationally shaky, and thus highly vulnerable to a frontal assault. Then he jumps forward to Greece in the 21st century. Though close to total economic collapse, there was no threat of total democratic collapse. The reason he proffers is that, by then, democracy had been around for decades. It's the same reason he's skeptical of writers that compare US democracy now with the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany: a young, shaky democracy, economic collapse that spread deep discontent with the government, a political figure backed up by an organized legion of thugs that quickly seized control of sources of information. Test this against the Capitol riot: Trump's attempted election theft was backed up by a disorganized mob draped in flags (American and Confederate) and wearing viking helmets whose numbers were too small to ever have a real chance of overthrowing the federal government and seizing control of sources of information across the entire country. Evidence of their crimes spread swiftly and globally. They're being identified and arrested and publicly castigated. Democracy survived. Another thing that separates Runciman: Inclusivity. He says democracy survives in the US because it's been in place for hundreds of years and we, average citizens accustomed to it, are the ones who keep it there. That also makes us complicit.
A coup d'etat works on the basis of intimidation and coercion. But a group that hides behind the workings of democracy can hope to get by on the public's innate passivity. In most functioning democracies, the people are bystanders much of the time anyway. They watch on as political decisions are taken on their behalf by elected representatives who then ask for their assent at election time. If that's what democracy has become, it provides excellent cover for the attempt to undermine democracy, because the two look remarkably similar.
A refreshing modification missing from most opinions on the potential failure of our democracy: we live in a representative democracy. We vote for politicians to take care of the tangled details so we have more time to do what we want. Problems arise from that system. It's not that he believes our democracy is impregnable. The open power grab may be unlikely to work but the one that works slowly, incrementally, anywhere other than the front, where we're not paying much attention, may. What's more, without the clarity of the direct government takeover, we live in a kind of gray space democratically, talking of its potential failure without ever really being sure if it's happened. His preferred term for this state of affairs: "zombie democracy."
Coups and real conspiracies go hand in hand. Another common cause of despair these days, though, is the persistent air of conspiracy theory without the coup. First, consider how representative democracy works: it empowers elites who, sooner or later, work away from the public eye. "Any political system that trumpets the value of openness while holding on to its secrets will create the space in which conspiracy theories can flourish." (Runciman forces me to reassess my earlier assumption: the elites are best positioned to adjust for advances in technology to locate the shadows beyond their reach and maintain the same relationship to society.) So we should always expect conspiracy theories to be floating around. The sense of despair becomes understandable, however, if a majority rather than a minority of people begin subscribing to them.
In this context, Runciman gives his definition of a term that I think is one of the most confusing of our time, seeing as it's been used against politicians as opposed as Trump and Bernie Sanders: populism. For Runciman, populism is the rhetoric of taking back power from the elites, fueled by conspiracy theory, and weaponized by marginal figures on both the right and the left. It's cropped up in the past under certain conditions: "economic distress, technological change, growing inequality and the absence of war." (On these grounds, his preferred comparison, though without suggesting it's a mirror image, for our time is to the 1890s.) And it's proved useful by pushing mainstream politicians to seek reform. Testing this against the financial crash of 2008, which he mentions, I must partially disagree with Runciman. Back then, there were perpetrators, not spectral bogeymen. Bernie Sanders wore no tinfoil hat, starred in no eerie YouTube videos, aimed his ire at no vague target. He sought real justice and real reform within the bounds of democracy. Clearly he did his part pushing the party toward, at the very least, modest reform, while always insisting that the final goal is major reform - the major reform Runciman himself admits would mark real progress. On the other hand, Trump came to prominence in political life with a racist conspiracy theory and ran for president on a vague conspiracy theory that Washington was a swamp he'd drain and once in office conspiracy theory (and, of course, out of office more conspiracy theory - and not in the neutral language of elites but in the inflammatory language of traitors and thieves). But then the other half of the characterization doesn't fit: though his messaging resonated to an extent with the segment of rightwing voters who lost homes and lost jobs and had no safety net to speak of, he pushes his party further right, toward undoing reform on most any level and away from democracy. Which sounds more demagogic and authoritarian than populist. This may be one difference between 2018 and 2021: Populism, he notes, can turn either into social democracy or something more malign. Trump is something more malign. Many would say he made the "turn" a long time ago, the populist element buried with it. Runciman didn't go so far as to call him an aspiring dictator or neofascist when How Democracy Ends was first published but perhaps he's changed his thinking after January 6th, 2020 due to the turn he refers to. Anyway, "populism" remains confusing. A bifurcation of the term (populist social democrat or democratic socialist/populist authoritarian or neofascist) would help but my questions are: Who does it really apply to and how long does the transitional term remain relevant? A blemish but Runciman makes his stance clear instead of continuing on assuming everyone accepts the equivalence. And it returns this section to the theme of popular discontent.
In a young democracy: Potential. Sweeping changes ahead. In a middle-aged democracy: The sweeping changes - expanding the franchise, the state providing social services - have already happened. Fights narrow. There's less potential.
Democracy is not working well - if it were, there would be no populist backlash. But attempts to make it work better focus on what we feel we have lost rather than on what we have never even tried. Political arguments revolve around ideas of recovery and rescue - of the welfare state, the constitution, the economy, our security, our freedom. Each side wants to recapture something that has been taken away. This helps to feed the conspiracist mindset. ...Trying something new can be a shared democratic experience. Rescuing something that has been lost is partial - the losers look for someone else to blame.
Another shared experience that has brought democratic nations together is war. After the 1890s, reforms were enacted that had the potential to bring progress. Then World War I came, and with it, for instance, mass enfranchisement in the US and Britain, since to mobilize people, they must be deeply invested in democracy. The New Deal was a sweeping attempt to address a political and economic crisis. Then World War II came. To fight a war, a nation needs healthy citizens and jobs for them to do. Thus: the welfare state.
An old political science slogan says that states make war and war makes states. Democracy is not an exception to that. Democracies make wars and wars make democracies. This sometimes gets obscured by another slogan of political science, which states that democracies don't go to war with each other. Even if this were true, there have always been enough militant non-democracies to go around.
Still, while wars between democracies and non-democracies continue to break out today, World War III is unlikely because advances in military weaponry would guarantee annihilation for everyone involved. So rising inequality, one of the primary causes for popular discontent, doesn't have war to mend it this time. "We do not have a historical answer to the question of how to tackle inequality that does not involve large-scale violence. There is no evidence that democracy alone can do it." And:
In democracy we now have a political system that can suppress the causes of violence without being able to address the problems that outbreaks of violence served to resolve in the past. Minor progress is possible. Big progress is elusive, and always liable to be derailed by the backlash small progress provokes. We may be stuck.
2021: Inequality increases. Minor progress. Backlash to minor progress. Mutual mistrust. And we're stuck.
