How Democracy Ends review – is people politics doomed?
Author: Andrew Rawnsley
No, argues David Runciman in this scintillating treatise about representative democracy and its contemporary discontents.
Donald Trump is “an old man with the political personality of a child”, but he is not “a proto-Hitler”.
We are not reliving the first half of the 20th century in Europe.
Vladimir Putin presides over a “parody democracy” in Russia, but he is not Stalin.
Some of the symptoms of democratic decay may seem familiar, but the disease is different. We make a potentially fatal mistake if we think that history is just repeating itself. Gaze obsessively into the rear-view mirror and we won’t see the true threats on the road ahead.
He is right to register “widespread contemporary disgust with democratic politics”. Some of the sources that he identifies will be familiar to readers of the burgeoning literature on the malaise afflicting the more mature democracies. Voter confidence has been sapped by governments that struggle to deliver the underlying contract to spread prosperity sufficiently widely and fairly that everyone has the sense of a stake in society. It is not surprising that many Americans were discontented enough to choose the wild ride of Trump when you consider that the average real wage in the United States has been stagnant for the past 40 years. The internet, far from being the elixir of democratic accountability and engagement that utopians once imagined, has poisoned the well. Opposed sects promote conspiracy theories in their rival echo bubbles rather than engage in reasoned debate around an agreed set of facts. Democracy has become more venomous – and at the same time more toothless. Governments flounder in the face of the disruption unleashed by the tech titans of Silicon Valley and subverters tilling the troll farms run out of the Kremlin. Short-termist politicians are inadequate to the task of tackling existential threats to humanity, such as climate change, because thinking about the end of the world “is too much for democracy to cope with”.
Runciman is gloomy because one of his key contentions is that representative government has lost the capacity to reinvigorate itself. In the opening decades of the 20th century, support for democracy was widened by extensions to the franchise and the foundation of welfare states. He offers the provocative thought that democracy also thrived – even depended upon – “chaos and violence” because they “bring the best out in it”. The second world war demonstrated the benefits of democracy when confronted by nazism. The cold war – this is my suggestion, not his – advertised why liberal capitalist democracy was superior to totalitarian communism.
For all its flaws, where democracy has enough time to put down roots it proves durable. He offers the example of Greece, a country that was ruled by a military junta within living memory. Despite a series of flailing governments presiding over a dire economic situation that has inflicted enormous stress on the population, the Greek military has not put a bootcap out of its barracks.
Yet Runciman finds this not a reason to be cheerful, but another cause for concern. A thought-stimulating strand of his case is that the resilience of the mature democracies is at the heart of their failings. “Stable democracies retain their extraordinary capacity to stave off the worst that can happen without tackling the problems that threatened disaster in the first place.” Despite the look-at-me title of the book, he doesn’t think democracy is over. Rather, he contends it is suffering a “midlife crisis”. In the American iteration, “Donald Trump is its motorbike”. His presidency could end in “a fireball” but it is more likely to be looked back at as a phase of decline that is “simply embarrassing”.
For all its manifest and manifold imperfections, democracy has a better record than any rival form of government
Runciman’s flair for turning a pithy and pungent phrase is one of the things to admire about his writing. The cogency, subtlety and style with which he teases out the paradoxes and perils faced by democracy makes this one of the very best of the great crop of recent books on the subject. What he doesn’t offer is solutions, bluntly admitting “I do not have any”. There is penetrating diagnosis here, but no suggestion of a cure. He considers the alternatives and rightly finds them wanting. The Chinese experiment with authoritarian capitalism may look seductive to those who think economic expansion is all that matters to a society, but can the repressive Beijing model survive the inevitable day when growth slows down? Government by experts, “the rule of the knowers” or “the epistocracy”, was advocated by Plato and is still promoted by those who regard citizens as too stupid to be trusted with making decisions. The public wouldn’t wear that and “intellectuals” are just as prone to making terrible mistakes as the crowd. Runciman seems attracted to the idea that technological advances could offer some form of “liberation”, but comes to the equivocal conclusion that this “includes all sorts of potential futures: some wondrous, some terrible, and most wholly unknowable”.
I share a lot of his anxieties, but ultimately he didn’t persuade me to subscribe to his underlying despair. For all its manifest and manifold imperfections, democracy has a better record than any rival form of government at sustaining free, innovative, peaceful and prosperous societies. Yes, democracy is often messy, clumsy and ineffectual. Yes, voters sometimes empower ghastly rulers. Yes, democracy is looking tired at this moment in its history. But almost despite himself, and without saying it this explicitly, Runciman seems to accept that there is something special about democracy. One of its great merits is the capacity for self-questioning and self-correction, which is lacking in other systems of government whether they be tyranny by emperor, colonel, president of the praesidium, priests or data. Democracy can go wrong, but it has the flexibility to put itself right. As Runciman acknowledges, “democratic politics assumes there is no settled answer to any question” and this “protects us against getting stuck with truly bad ideas”. As Tocqueville put it: “More fires get started in a democracy, but more fires get put out too.”
I finished this book feeling more hopeful than I thought I would be and the author probably expects his readers to be. Democracy can change its mind and by doing so it can improve its circumstances and prospects. This is a precious quality that contains within it the possibility of renewal. Donald Trump is not the end of democracy’s story.
How Democracy Ends by David Runciman
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/20/how-democracy-ends-david-runciman-review-trump
Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen review
with Trump, there is no shared reality
The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
The world is in turmoil. From Russia, Turkey, and Egypt to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result, democracy itself may now be at risk.
Two core components of liberal democracy―individual rights and the popular will―are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.” The consequence, as Yascha Mounk shows in this brilliant and timely book, is that trust in politics is dwindling. Citizens are falling out of love with their political system. Democracy is wilting away. Drawing on vivid stories and original research, Mounk identifies three key drivers of voters’ discontent: stagnating living standards, fear of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media. To reverse the trend, politicians need to enact radical reforms that benefit the many, not the few.
The People vs. Democracy is the first book to describe both how we got here and what we need to do now. For those unwilling to give up either individual rights or the concept of the popular will, Mounk argues that urgent action is needed, as this may be our last chance to save democracy.
https://www.amazon.com/People-vs-Democracy-Freedom-Danger/dp/0674976827
The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades--and he fought with the Polish ant-communist movement to abolish it. Having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, however, he has discovered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture, and human nature.
In The Demon in Democracy, Legutko explores the shared objectives between these two political systems, and explains how liberal democracy has over time lurched towards the same goals as communism, albeit without Soviet style brutalality.
Both systems, says Legutko, reduce human nature to that of the common man, who is led to believe himself liberated from the obligations of the past. Both the communist man and the liberal democratic man refuse to admit that there exists anything of value outside the political systems to which they pledged their loyalty. And both systems refuse to undertake any critical examination of their ideological prejudices.
https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Democracy-Totalitarian-Temptations-Societies/dp/1594039917/
How to Be a Dictator by Frank Dikötter review
- the cult of personality
Born in obscurity, frustrated in youth, the dictator rises through accident, patronage or anything except merit to blossom into a fully fledged evil-doer, desperate for the respect and admiration that are wrung from the populace only by skilled PR manipulation. Often feigning modesty, he soon generates a cult that he personally develops. Women and even brave men feel overcome in his presence; schoolchildren chant the praise of the father of the nation; artists and writers deify the great leader. Dictators generally come equipped with an ideology, but since they have no principles, only a lust for power, the process of propagation turns it into a mockery.
Although dictators often fancy themselves as writers or philosophers, they fail to make the grade as intellectuals, and the Little Red Books they produce are travesties. If they are dictators of the left, their attempts at radical reform bring famine and suffering to the population. If dictators of the right, they go to war, with the same consequence of popular suffering, and lead the nation to shameful defeat. They long to be popular, and put great effort into creating that illusion, but it is all fakery. Surrounded by sycophants, they are friendless, lonely and paranoid. Most of them die a dog’s death, but if they somehow manage to avoid this, people only pretend to mourn them. After their death, they are quickly forgotten.
This is the collective portrait that emerges from Frank Dikötter’s book, the eight chapters of which deal with Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Haiti’s “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu and Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam. Despite their fundamental similarities, his dictators do have stylistic differences. Stalin allowed streets and cities to be named after him, while Mao did not. Hitler was a teetotaller and Duvalier a follower of the occult. Kim’s floodlit statue towered over Pyongyang, following the tradition of Stalin statues, but Hitler vetoed the construction of statues of himself (thinking this honour should be reserved for great historical figures), and Ceauşescu and Duvalier felt the same. Some dictators’ enforcers wore brown shirts, others black, and still others had no uniform. Mussolini and Hitler excelled as orators, while Stalin was an undistinguished speaker who never addressed mass rallies. Stalin, Mao and Duvalier wrote poetry, Hitler painted and Mussolini played the violin.
In the chapters on the “big” dictators – Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao – Dikötter dwells on the cult that developed round them. All of them headed a party that borrowed some of their charisma, and their regimes featured a variety of secret police and enforcers as well as cheerleaders and informers. Ordinary people were encouraged to believe that anything bad was done by subordinates without the dictator’s knowledge (“If only the Duce/Fūhrer/vozhd’ knew”). In fact, the dictators repeatedly made terrible mistakes and appear to have had few if any lasting achievements. With Mao and Stalin, the “dog’s death” trope doesn’t quite fit, but Dikötter runs a modified form of it anyway. Dying, Stalin lay unattended, “soaked in his own urine”, and “one month after his funeral”, his “name vanished from the newspapers”.
Dikötter’s sources are impressive, including 16 archives from nine countries, one of them being the former Soviet Central Party Archive (now renamed RGASPI) in Moscow. Despite this, I did not find the Stalin chapter particularly compelling, no doubt partly because I do not share the author’s view that the cult is the most interesting thing about Stalin. When Dikötter writes that the dry-as-dust Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party, in whose composition Stalin participated, “deified Stalin as the living fount of wisdom”, I wonder if he has actually read it.
For me, the most entertaining chapters of this book were about the dictators I was least familiar with. It is intriguing to read that the remains of Mengistu’s predecessor, Emperor Haile Selassie, were possibly “buried underneath his office, placing his desk right above the corpse”. The stand-out dictator, in terms of entertainment value, is Duvalier, with his personal militia the Tonton Macoutes, who “dressed like gangsters, with shiny blue-serge suits, dark, steel-rimmed glasses and grey homburg hats” for their enforcement duties. Duvalier modelled himself on Baron Samedi, the Vodou spirit of the dead and guardian of cemeteries, and sometimes dressed the part, all in black, with top hat and carrying a cane. Dikötter characterises him as a “dictator’s dictator”, by which I think he means the stripped-down model with “no true party” and without the “pretence of ideology”. Certainly Duvalier has a claim to be the reductio ad absurdum.
He is one of two dictators in the book with dynastic ambitions for their sons, the other – and more successful over the long term – being Kim. That seems to me an important difference from the others, including all the “big” ones, but Dikötter does not remark on it. Overall, his argument is that dictators’ cults are not peripheral phenomena but lie “at the very heart of tyranny”. He holds that, contrary to widespread belief, the dictators had not “captured the souls of their subjects and … cast a spell on them”. “There never was a spell. There was fear, and when it evaporated the entire edifice collapsed.” This seems a strange conclusion when it comes to Stalin, whose successors wrestled with his legacy for decades, and an even stranger one for Mao, the dictator closest to Dikötter own field of expertise. But denying any contemporary popularity or lasting impact to the dictators seems to be the main point of the book.
While Dikötter is explicitly dealing with 20th-century dictators, the stage is set in the preface by France’s 18th-century Sun King, Louis XIV, a great practitioner of political theatre, remembered for his aphorism “L’État, c’est moi”. But if Louis was a model for any of the 20th-century dictators, we don’t hear of it in this book. For that matter we learn little about whom the dictators modelled themselves on (or against) and how they reacted to each other. Yet surely Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin kept an interested eye on each other’s PR practices and on occasion quietly imitated them; and Mao was scarcely indifferent to Stalin’s example.
Questions of chronology, sequence and influence are not much discussed here. The mid 20th century is generally considered the heyday of dictators of the right and the left, but Dikötter does not explore why this might have been so, and even obscures the issue by including chronological outliers such as Mengistu. It is important to study dictators, he suggests, because they are an eternal threat to democracy and freedom – but not, it seems an acute current threat. “Dictators today, with the exception of Kim Jong-un, are a long way from instilling the fear their predecessors inflicted on their population at the height of the twentieth century … Even a modicum of historical perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline.” That’s reassuring. Perhaps it would be churlish to ask how we got so lucky.
How to Be a Dictator is published by Bloomsbury
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/26/how-to-be-dictator-frank-dikotter-review
