HERE is an invitation to scan the titles of just a few of the many books on democracy published in the last two years: Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die; Adam Przeworski, Crises of Democracy; Astra Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone; Yascha Mounk, The People vs Democracy; Benjamin Carter Hett, Death of Democracy; David Runciman, How Democracy Ends. This is only an illustrative list, not an exhaustive one, and it needs to be said that similar lists can be compiled on the topics of populism, authoritarianism and tyranny, all of which have got a new lease of life in recent scholarship.

From these lists, even a visitor from an alien planet could easily glean what we already know, that democracy is in deep trouble on ours. Across the world – from Europe, East and West, to the Americas North and South, and Asia, from India to the Philippines – analysts of the contemporary travails of democracy fret that it is slipping into forms of authoritarianism if not out-right tyranny, because citizens are disenchanted or dissatisfied with it. Democracy often finds representation as a living being, frequently a sick or ageing individual, a patient struck by some terrible, terminal disease that could plausibly lead to the cessation of life itself. Thus, David Runciman’s How Democracies End depicts it as suffering a mid-life crisis, even something akin to a nervous breakdown; Nadia Urbinati’s Democracy Disfigured identifies what she describes as disfigurations, and even ‘alarming mutations’, that can be observed in the ‘basic traits composing the democratic figure.’¹ Levistky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die seek to not merely post the obituary but also explain it with an account of ‘how’ the patient died or faces imminent death.

 

Two global reports also reflect this anxiety. Based on a large comparative dataset on democracy, the Annual Democracy Report prepared by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), identifies ‘disquieting trends’ and a tendency towards autocratization in countries such as Brazil, India, Poland, Russia, Turkey and the United States. India and the US are signalled as first-time backsliders, manifesting ‘significant declines in liberal democracy’.² The International IDEA report argues that while democracy grew impressively from the 1970s to the 2000s, it appeared in 2017 to be fragile in many countries and regions, as corruption and state capture, the manipulation of electoral processes, and threats to minority rights, had made democratic institutions vulnerable to setbacks.³ Both reports flag populism as a concern.

The dominant response to this anxiety about the crisis of democracy has indeed been to describe that which has replaced it as populism. This exercise in renaming it fails, however, to explain why democracy is in crisis and, even less, to explain the forms of ‘democratic authoritarianism’ or ‘authoritarian democracy’ that this crisis has generated.⁴ Though populism has spawned a veritable academic industry, the category seems merely to shift our attention from the problem by giving it a new name, and fails to acknowledge the empirical imperfections or limitations of democracy as a political form. It strives instead to keep the idea of democracy itself pristine and uncontaminated by suggesting that the populism that has taken its place is a corrupted aberration. This is a minor form of self-deception, for it avoids acknowledgment of the fact that populists come to power claiming the popular mandate, claiming that they are the voice of the people, and claiming the validating label of democracy for themselves. On what grounds may we deny popularly elected leaders this satisfaction of having come to power through (for the sake of argument) free and fair elections? It would appear that there are contending conceptions of democracy at work here, in which a conflict over fundamental principles is entailed.

 

Representative democracy, the classic form of democracy, took a couple of centuries of political struggle to include previously excluded groups. Over the last half-century, it found several new iterations in the ideas and practices of social-democracy, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, and so on. The provenance of most of these (with the possible exception of participatory democracy) was in the Global North, which arrogated to itself the tasks of strengthening or deepening democracy in the Global South.A series of events – including the Brexit referendum and the US election of 2016 – brought into question many of our settled (and their complacent) assumptions about the triumphs of democracy in the Global North; above all the assumption that Anglo-American liberal democracy stood on the unshakeable foundations of a fine pedigree, philosophical and political, and time-tested historical practice.

 

Today, rather like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, most democratic societies are unhappy in their own way. It could be argued that what appears to be the dark side of democracy is actually the fulfillment of democracy’s logic, the democratizing of democracy, as it were. The failure to prevent the capture of democracy by elites, the failure to untether it from its deep links with capital, and the failure above all to address the incompatibility between the political equality guaranteed by democracy and the growing material inequality generated by the capitalist economy, left the democratic project open to appropriation by those that may be more or less scrupulous, more or less neo-liberal, even more or less authoritarian, but nevertheless possess the ability to speak to the demos with more powerful conviction than the enervated, hollowed-out discourse of liberal democracy can. In the consolidated democracies of the Global North, therefore, the new democratic project is about renewing the democratic ideal. Since the foundations – an independent judiciary, free media, universities and a vibrant civil society – remain strong, the project is not beyond repair or retrieval.

The younger, relatively fragile, democracies of the Global South face a more arduous challenge. Historically, their trajectories have ranged widely from unstable transitions to democracy to periodic lapses into authoritarianism; from the political effects of poverty and inequality to those of the curse of natural resources like oil. In the present, the destabilization of the democratic project in the Global South is reflected in ways that suggest important differences with the North: the crippling of civil society and the suppression of intellectual freedom; the enervation of state institutions and the debilitation of checks and balances, as all branches of government abdicate their autonomy and offer obeisance to the will of the executive. In such a context, the resilience of the very infrastructure of democracy is called into question. This is especially in the context of majoritarian politics that create gradations of citizenship and cultivate social cleavages by sowing seeds of division deep into the soil of the society.

 

A contention that arguably lies at the heart of both projects – of democratic renewal in the North as much as of democratic reconstruction in the South – is the discontent around the idea of representative democracy, embodied in the institutional form of elected legislatures. It is effectively the representativeness of representative democracy that has been called into question, both where it has been formally successful for a couple of centuries, as also in places where its roots were not as deep. Where it has been formally successful, there is the perception that representative democracy has been captured by wealthy self-serving elites; even where it is less firmly embedded, frustration with corrupt and venal politicians has expressed itself in the preference for strong and even autocratic leadership.

Two surveys of attitudes to democracy have, for instance, shown that Indians prefer autocratic government or are not disparaging of it. The Pew Research Center’s survey showed that 55% of Indians support rule by a strong leader or even military rule as a good way to govern. Similarly, recent CSDS-Lokniti-APU surveys on society and politics have shown that people avow democracy but have a very weak commitment to what we might call liberal values – of freedom of speech, minority rights, pluralism and diversity. Despite the more robust foundations of the democracies of the North, there is irony in this convergence of popular attitudes in the Global North and South. In places like Hong Kong and Bolivia, of course, even the façade of democracy is blown.

 

Across the world, the reaction to the breakdown of representative democracy, to its legitimacy deficit and its broken promises, has found expression in some version of populism that lays claim to being a purer or more genuine form of democracy. In the standard liberal or thin version of representative democracy, the people’s will is carried out through a set of institutions that guarantee political equality in the election of representatives in a form that is blind to difference. A thicker version, recognizing diversity, aims at legislative bodies that reflect the social composition of the population, to ensure that the interests, concerns and preferences of minorities or women or otherwise marginalized groups find voice in laws and policies. When representative democracy fails these expectations, a propitious environment for populist leadership is created.

Representative democracy and populism offer very different answers to the question of who the people are and what their place in a democracy is or should be. Populist politicians make grand claims to speak for the people, promise to provide a more responsive democracy than that offered by representative institutions. Populist leadership invokes a singular conception of the people, which it claims to represent in its undifferentiated homogenous entirety, and to which it somewhat condescendingly attributes a lack of understanding and a cheerful propensity to be led.

 

In some versions of it, direct and unmediated citizen participation in democracy through, for instance, referenda, is celebrated; in all versions of it, representative institutions like elected legislatures are systematically diminished, as populist leaders typically claim to be closer to the people and to represent them more effectively than mediating institutions like legislatures. In doing so, they tap into a general discontent with representative democracy when people do not see democracy as delivering for them, or enacting their preferences into policy, but instead facilitating rule by corrupt politicians who only advance their own interests.

Populism also robs the idea of democracy of all normativity and reduces it to its foundational principle of raw numbers: democracy is about majority rule, not about the values we typically associate with it – justice, freedom, equality, non-discrimination and rights. An electoral mandate provides a self-perpetuating justification for departures from basic democratic principles like the equal moral worth of, and equal respect for, fellow citizens. For the populist, whatever the majority wills and wants is fair. This majority could be a dominant religious or racial group – it could be Hindu supremacists in India or white supremacists in the United States, the legitimating principle is the same.

This reconfiguration of the democratic principle to denote the supremacy of numbers leads to the elision between majority as a procedure, a mechanism for producing a government for all, and a majority as a fixed hegemonic group. Because, for instance, the Hindu religious majority is numerically dominant, it is assumed that it is consistent with democracy that its interests should be privileged over those of other communities. This distortion in the idea of democracy – as the pure rule of numbers – provides support for majoritarian beliefs and for the denial of minority rights.

 

This is a distortion of the basic premises of liberal democracy in two senses. First, the premise of that idea of democracy is that, albeit elected by a majority of the voters, once elected, the government is the government of all members of the political community. Second, it is assumed that majorities and minorities are fluid, and not fixed, entities that change depending on issues. In societies that are either organically heterogeneous in their social or ethnic composition, or have become so as a consequence of migration, there is of course a tendency for majorities and minorities to coalesce around identity. Populist leaders reject these premises. They choose to appeal to a restricted constituency, and to see themselves as accountable only to their own ethnic or social base. A more broad-based appeal may be cultivated rhetorically, but undercut by dog-whistle messaging to the opposite effect.

If democracy is only about the numbers needed to prevail and rule, it can cohabit quite easily with a majoritarianism that translates the idea of democracy as majority rule into democracy as the rule of a fixed ethnic or religious majority. It is an idea that can cohabit quite easily with the choice of a populist leader, even an autocratic strongman who promises effective action. It is an idea that can also cohabit quite easily with a weak commitment to freedom and liberty, to free speech, to an inclusive society; to the freedom to eat, pray and love as you like. The success of populism demonstrates the ease with which the democratic idea can be annexed to a variety of political projects. Populism thus retains the shell of the democratic ideal, but transforms it into something suspiciously non-democratic.

Unfortunately, our limited political imaginations have so far only produced well meaning but tried (and sometimes failed) remedies to avert the imminent demise of democracy. These often centre on the recovery of liberal values such as pluralism to counter hate and xenophobia; or the use of public reasoning to resolve disagreements through debate rather than violence. India is a country in which a thriving multicultural democracy, with strong foundations in history and an enlightened Constitution, has yielded all too easily to a majoritarian nationalism that sports a definitive animosity to pluralism. Similarly, we are often urged to offer persuasive rational arguments in the vitiated ‘public’ sphere of social media, but it is not clear how public reasoning can thrive in a sphere populated by bots for hire. While these ‘back to the future’ reinstatements of liberal values as key to the recovery of the democratic project are morally appealing, the itinerary is elusive.

 

Its value, however, lies in its pushing us to rethink the relationship between democracy and liberalism. Democracy, as we have noted, is a tool of legitimacy for the populist leader for whom the concept offers a handy cloak for authoritarian policies and practices. From Russia to India, liberalism has fallen on even harder times than democracy. It is not simply a derogatory word; in conjunction with the word ‘retard’ it yields the popular abuse ‘libtard’. It is not surprising then that, across the world, this has been a time of lamentation about the demise of not just democracy, but also liberalism. The phenomenon of populism has been explained in terms of the decoupling of liberalism from democracy.⁵

But is this decoupling unrelated to the disjoining of both of these from inequality in the time of neo-liberal capitalism? We attribute the decline of democracy to its decoupling from liberal values; and simultaneously attribute the appeal of populism to the inequality engendered by neo-liberal capitalism. But we tend to elide the integral historical connection between liberalism, democracy and capitalism. Historically, it was the liberal values of individualism and freedom that provided the foundation for free market capitalism; and also informed the neo-liberal turn that is the progenitor of contemporary inequality on which we blame the disaffection of the people.

 

The crisis of capitalism and the inequality that it has spawned (the phenomenon of The One Percent) contributed to the disenchantment with democracy which had legitimized the fiction of a free and fair society. The crisis also exposed the hypocrisy of the liberal guarantee of equal individual freedom – arguably the freedom to starve, to be unemployed, to be homeless. Democracy is in the throes of a legitimacy crisis in which inequality underpins the disillusionment of ordinary citizens with this game in which the elites essentially play out a version of the children’s party game, Musical Chairs.

The idea that the discrediting of liberalism is a big part of the populist project was given credence most recently in the interview of Russian President Putin to the Financial Times.⁶ In India, too, populist leaders are seen as representing the non-elite, those who reject liberalism as alien. In this debate, liberalism appears as a symbol of elite dispositions and has more to do with felicity in the English language than with Enlightenment values like rights and liberty. The recent booming sales of Mein Kampf translated into multiple Indian languages – in 2015, the Kindle version was Amazon India’s 11th best selling book – appears to confirm this trend.⁷

 

Nevertheless, the assumption that populism is implacably hostile to liberalism needs examination. For even when the populist leader dismisses liberalism – as Putin said in that FT interview, it has ‘outlived its purpose’ as it has ‘come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population’ – he by no means forsakes economic liberalism. Putin and Trump are no socialists. Indeed, the populist project strongly recalls the work of the conservative political theorist Carl Schmitt whose writings illustrate the affinities between a purely economic liberalism and political authoritarianism. His critique of the liberal state for its inability to distinguish properly between friends and enemies is likewise strongly suggestive of contemporary forms of atavistic nationalism.

Populism actually lays bare the profound contradictions within liberalism as a political and an economic project; between the moral and philosophical foundations and the political values of liberalism, on the one hand, and the support that these provide for the capitalist economy, on the other. It is no secret, for instance, that neo-liberalism has encouraged the privatization of public services and the rolling back of social welfare, alongside the reification of state control and surveillance in relation to the freedom of private citizens.

At least three types of correctives will be needed for a renewal of the democratic project: insulate democratic processes and institutions from majoritarianism; mitigate inequality and prevent plutocracy, recalibrating the relationship between political and economic liberalism; demolish the false equivalence between elites and experts that has enabled fake news and alternate facts to thrive and flourish. In countries like ours, it will additionally require the restoration of the autonomy of institutions of governance; guarantees of freedom for civil society and universities; and the independence of the media.

 

In September 2019, at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychologists in Lisbon, Professor Shawn Rosenberg of the University of California at Irvine caused a stir. In his paper titled ‘Democracy Devouring Itself: The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right-Wing Populism’, Rosenberg argued that the responsibility for the decline of democracy must be laid at the door of the incompetent citizen, lacking in the necessary cognitive and emotional capacities. Democracy, he said, places demands on citizens – such as the intellectual ability to process information and sift the true from the false – that ordinary citizens just don’t possess, hence the phenomenon of democracy devouring itself.

This intriguingly Kafkaesque image of auto-cannibalism is at odds with another conception of politics, as something formed in and through the clash of opinions, through debate in a public sphere that is the creation of a plurality of human beings. This, in the vision of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, is obviously impossible when an authoritarian leader uses propaganda to make lies appear as true and so exploit the vulnerabilities and anxieties of people. The recovery of the dignity of politics, according to her, entails the restoration of people to their membership in the polity, to citizenship, to the right to have rights. It entails also the constitution of the public space in which all are political equals, and in which individuals can form opinions, and express and test them in and through debate. An Arendtian politics depends crucially upon the citizen’s freedom of political thought and action.

 

The logical conclusion of the ‘democracy devouring itself’ argument, legitimizing the populist strongman’s leadership by appealing to the incompetence of the citizen, is to give up on democracy forever, and to wait only for the remains to be interred. But should a downturn in its fortunes over a decade or less be allowed to completely discredit an idea that is at least five thousand years old, reinvented in Europe in the 18th century and re-imagined in the post colony in the 20th century? Or should this be treated as an opportunity to work towards a more responsive and accountable democracy that empowers citizens and gives them political agency?

 

* A version of this article was delivered as an ICAS-MP Special Lecture at the CSDS, Delhi on 23 September 2019.

Footnotes:

1. Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2014, p. 2.

2. V-Dem Institute, Democracy for All? V-Dem Annual Democracy Report 2018. Varieties of Democracy Institute, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2018.

3. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, The Global State of Democracy: Exploring Democracy’s Resilience, Stockholm, 2017, p. 36.

4. Democratic authoritarianism refers to the adoption of democratic institutions by authoritarian regimes, to prevent genuine democratization (Dawn Brancati, ‘Democratic Authoritarianism: Origins and Effects’, Annual Review of Political Science17, 2014, pp. 313-26.). ‘Authoritarian democracy’ could be seen as an inversion of this, referring to democratic regimes that have adopted authoritarian modes of rule. A more eclectic and useful approach to the presence of authoritarian elements in democracy refers to the ‘admixture’ of authoritarian and democratic elements that co-exist and mutually shape each other (Kanchan Chandra, ‘Authoritarian Elements in Democracy’, Seminar 693, May 2017).

5. Yascha Mounk, The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom is In Danger and How to Save It. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2018.

6. The Financial Times, ‘Liberalism "has outlived its purpose",’ Interview with Vladimir Putin, 27 June 2019.

7. On the other hand, Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners has come to enjoy unprecedented popularity in intellectual circles, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 have become available in very cheap editions in India.

References

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Vintage Books, New York, 1996.

David Runciman, How Democracy Ends. Profile Books, London, 2018.

Shawn Rosenberg, ‘Democracy Devouring Itself: The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right Wing Populism, 2019. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8806z01m

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. Viking/Penguin Random House, New York, 2018.