“Democracy” is a slogan, a value-judgement more than it is a description, and a term of praise and abuse in political debates more than a defined programme.
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license – Dictatorship_99
Democracy, we read these days, is under threat from people like you and me. Or at least something labelled “Democracy;” whether it’s defined as an ideology, a series of procedures, or just not really defined at all, is under threat from people like us voting for the wrong political parties. The German media is freaking out this week about opinion polls showing the AfD gaining even more support. The French political elite claims that Democracy itself would be under threat if anyone were to be irresponsible enough to vote for the Rassemblement national. Indeed, for much of the European media and much of the political class, there is only one significant subject in politics today: talking endlessly about the need to stop the “extreme Right.”
Now I’m not going to offer you yet another diatribe on the hypocrisy of a political system which claims to believe that democracy can be saved only if people are prevented from voting in particular ways. I don’t do diatribes very well, anyway. Rather, and faithful to this site’s basic premise of treating politics as engineering and looking at forces, stresses and processes, I want to try to set out how I think we have got into this Ubuesque mess. But since the kind of confused and often aggressive rhetoric we are seeing about “defending Democracy” comes out of somewhere—it always does—it’s worth first of all trying to see where that somewhere is, and then going on to look at some of the deeper underlying forces which have brought us to where we are.
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There is no agreed definition of “Democracy,” you will be astonished to hear, just as there are few countries in the world which explicitly claim not to be democracies. Proudly proclaiming your nation not to be a democracy has gone out of fashion, if not necessarily entirely out of use. Let’s just remark here in passing that, like a lot of Liberal political ideas, Democracy can mean basically anything you want it to mean, depending the power and influence you can exert, and different and even conflicting interpretations of it can co-exist quite happily in the mind of the modern politician or pundit, to be called forward variously when the situation demands.
And in many ways, this is the root of the problem. “Democracy” is a slogan, a value-judgement more than it is a description, and a term of praise and abuse in political debates more than a defined programme. To be “democratic” is to be good: to be “anti-democratic” is to be perceived as the Other, Agamben’s Outlaw (literally outside the protection of the law) against whom all kinds of normally unacceptable measures can legitimately be taken. Because “Democracy” is very largely a content-free term therefore, its meaning in a given context is naturally determined by the balance of political forces surrounding it. No Court, for example, could rule on whether a given initiative or personality or party was “democratic,” except by reference to laws which are themselves a product of the balance of political forces. The result is total confusion about ideas, and when you have that, total confusion of discourse and argument inevitably follows.
If they were asked, most people would repeat what they have heard or learnt about Democracy. For some, it’s about “rule by the people,” literally translating the Greek. For others, it’s “having elections.” Two things are immediately obvious. One is that there is no obvious connection between the two ideas (the Soviet Union had elections, whereas the Greeks didn’t, in our sense) and it’s not even clear whether the second is supposed to be a special case of the first. The other is that each has a host of hidden assumptions, preconditions and unresolvable problems hidden in it. Some of the questions are very fundamental. How do the people rule? Does the term in fact even mean anything? Aren’t the people divided on most issues anyway? Who gets to decide what the people think? Does everything work by referendum or even sortition? What happens when mistakes are made? What happens when the people can’t make up their mind? And what about elections? Any old elections? Well, what about “free and fair” elections? In which case how do you judge and who judges? Are “free elections” where anyone can stand? Or are certain people—let’s say the “extreme Right”— precluded from standing, and if so who decides and what does that do to the concept of “freedom?” And what is a “fair” election? Who gets to judge? Indeed, what would a “fair” election actually look like? What happens if a party wins the popular vote but not a majority of seats? Is that fair? Should the losing party always accept defeat? What happens if there has been obvious and transparent electoral fraud? Or fairly obvious fraud? Or indications of fraud but nobody is sure? Or allegations of fraud fiercely denied?
Now, whilst all of this is good stuff for Political Science seminars, and has generated a massive literature there isn’t time to go into here, it’s actually a lot more serious than that. The reality is, that most people don’t think of themselves as living in “a Democracy.” They think of themselves living in a country where the State is responsive or not responsive to their needs, where the State itself functions well or badly, behaves well or badly to them, where it does or does not provide the services they need, where it does or does not protect them, where the political system is more honest or less honest, and where it is ultimately responsive or not to public opinion. Abstract considerations of the theory of “Democracy” don’t enter into ordinary peoples’ discourse, which in turn is why blood-curdling warnings about the “End of Democracy” seldom have any effect. “If this is Democracy, then you can keep it,” is thus a common reaction among those who are on the receiving end of such threats.
The problem, of course, is that “Democracy” is the prototypical Liberal subject. It is pre-emptively and normatively a Good Thing, which means arguments against it, or even about it, are automatically foreclosed, and those who stray from the permitted narrow normative line of expression (which wanders all over the place of course, as circumstances change) can be safely excommunicated. In addition, it’s highly technical, full of rules and regulations, and a source of endless professional opportunities for lawyers, journalists, academics, psephologists, opinion-formers, and lots of people who can’t do anything else. And finally, it both allows the struggle for power, arbitrated and managed by such people, to be largely non-ideological (by ruling out awkward ideas from the beginning) and also permits its practitioners to look down with moral superiority at the rest of us, as they tell us what to do and who not to vote for. Since none of the words they use mean anything precise, those who control the discourse have no need to argue rationally for or against the acceptability or otherwise of ideas, candidates or parties. Assertion will do. So this party or candidate is Extremist, this one is Moderate, this election was fair, this one wasn’t, this candidate actually won although they were supposed to have lost and this candidate really won because the opposition cheated. Since there is no obligation to provide any evidence, there is no way of checking, let alone opposing, such normative claims. We are just supposed to accept them.
The fact that there is an enormous gap between what people want of their governments, and what the system is prepared to provide these days, also leads to the related question of Legitimacy. As with “Democracy”, “Legitimacy” is an unhelpfully vague concept. The word is derived of course from the Latin word lex, meaning “law,” which also gives us “legal,” “legislation,” and other related terms. So the one-sentence definition of a legitimate government is one that has been legally elected. Thank you. Well, we might recall at this point that much depends on who makes the rules: the Soviet government was legally elected after all. (It also depends on what the rules are.) Modern Liberal thinking sees a legitimate government as one that has been elected according to fussy and complicated electoral rules, and acts, in theory anyway, according to a series of formal legal constraints. The content of what it does is assumed to be mostly irrelevant as long as the correct procedures are followed. Moreover, in the true Liberal spirit of making complicated things even more complicated, political systems also have to have “checks and balances,” “oversight,” and “countervailing powers:” vague and contested concepts that may or may not actually be different from each other, but in any case provide gainful employment for members of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) who are not currently in government, or perhaps seek power in other ways. And if you are a Professor of Public Law, you can thus write learned articles for the masses explaining how formidably complex actually quite simple issues of legitimacy are.
But I suggested that there were political engineering problems behind all this confusion about “Democracy,” so let’s look at the main one, which can be easily summarised: who takes the decisions, on what basis do they claim the legitimacy to do so, and how do they get that legitimacy accepted? The last point actually comes before the others, because, whilst sheer power and the use of violence can enable individuals and groups to take and enforce decisions up to a point, you can’t build a functioning society that way. The really interesting question, first articulated in our day by Michel Foucault, but not originated by him, was not so much why people rebel, but why people obey. And the answer, in all its manifestations, is a lot more complex than you might think.
For most of human history, people have not consciously thought about such questions. Had you stopped an Assyrian or an Egyptian of an early dynasty to ask them why they obeyed their ruler, they would have looked puzzled, and said something like “it’s like that.” And it was like that. We in the modern West are the first civilisation in which its elements—including power, but many other things—are disconnected from each other. Within very broad cultural boundaries, our society, our family system, our education systems, our political systems, our philosophies, our religions, our cosmologies, our ethics, our customs, our laws, our economies, our concept of history, our concept of science, our concept of the arts and just about everything else, have their own specific origins, their own divergences, follow their own rules and power structures, and have their own objectives, often in competition with each other, or at best ignoring each other.
To most of our ancestors, and to many societies in the world today, this would have seemed beyond belief. The world was (and in some cases still partly is) conceived as an organised, magical whole, where everything was connected to everything else, and the entire world was like a book in which every animal, tree, stone and natural phenomenon was a sign from the Creator. We are so very far away now from such a mentality that it’s hard to get people even to accept that it ever existed. That’s why in desperation pundits and even historians now often seek materialist explanations for things that, at the time, people did or thought for well-understood and accepted non-material reasons, even if we now find those reasons incomprehensible. And integral to them was a sense of inherent Order. After all, no matter how symbolically you take the Creation Myth of your civilisation, Creation implies structure, and structure implies order. Surely, no Creator is just going to throw the bits down and say “get on with it.”
Thus, ultimate decision-taking power followed a structure determined by the creation of the world in which you lived. Of course many day-to-day decisions were taken by the traditional social structures: the sowing of the harvest might require a ritual sacrifice, but the detail would be worked out by the elders of the village who had done it fifty times before. Nonetheless, and not the least in pre-modern Europe, human beings lived inside a divinely constructed and ordained universe, in which things were as they were, because they were. The pre-modern universe was hierarchical, at least as much in its cosmology as in its political organisation and social structure. Above all, its view of reality was symbolic and metaphorical, not a matter of literal interpretation of texts: maps often showed Jerusalem as the centre of the world, not because it was geographically literally so, but because it was the world’s symbolic centre. The Bible was not meant to be interpreted literally, but according to four layers of increasing symbolism. Kings and Emperors were demigods (in some societies of course they were actual gods) whose touch could heal, whose health was reflected in the health of the country, and who were appointed by God, with severe sanctions against anyone who tried to depose them, all of which was part of the natural order of things.
We cannot even in principle imagine what it must have been like to live in such a society, where the Sun and the Moon were living beings, where animals had souls (where do you think the word “animal” comes from?) and the Earth and the human race and its relationship with its creator God was at the literal and symbolic centre of everything. It’s not really worth trying, which is perhaps why historians have, rather desperately, scoured the records of those days to find the tiniest economic and political precursors of modernism, which usually amount to little if anything in practice. (Attempts to argue that we still live in an “enchanted” universe today because people read astrology columns in the media are frankly fatuous in this context.)
This way of thinking didn’t die overnight with the “new philosophy” that, as John Donne complained, “calls all in doubt.” The concept of a divinely ordered and structured world, and therefore society, and therefore a legitimate political system, lasted well into the eighteenth century, and in popular culture much longer. As children used to sing in Church before the verse was censored:
The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly/And ordered their estate.
Ordinary people of the day were not necessarily seething wth proto-democratic revolutionary ideas either, even if they complained. Most of the complaints—as in the famous French Cahiers de doléances were actually reactionary, not revolutionary, in nature, demanding the restoration of traditional privileges, the dismissal of corrupt officials and the like. What Liberals saw as progress, ordinary people often distrusted and feared; partly, it’s true, out of innate conservatism, but partly also because it was destroying the world they had once known, without providing any coherent structure to replace it. The violent resistance in the West of France to the acts of the new Revolutionary regimes in Paris was directed against a group of middle-class intellectuals who seemed bent on destroying everything that gave any meaning to the world, and often pointlessly so. What was the point of closing churches, for example, only to then create the cult of the Supreme Being and demand that people worship it?
It’s probably true that a political philosophy like Liberalism, based on the pursuit of radical individualism, is logically incapable of developing an agreed overarching structure. Ironically, such a potential structure would have some resemblance to fascism: my rights and your rights inevitably come into conflict and the stronger wins, either by brute force or through having the most expensive lawyer. But once you move away from a coherent traditional theory of power and responsibilities, underpinned by religious belief in a structured order, you find yourself in the political equivalent of the ethical confusion identified by Alasdair MacIntyre. Purely human attempts to develop and implement theories of government simply cannot cope with the complexities of modern civilisations, and pretty much always degenerate into a series of slogans, embodying vague concepts that are then enforced by fussy but imperfect rules. This doesn’t mean that we should go back to the Divine Right of Kings, of course, but it does mean that we should accept that political systems created by humans will be imperfect, and stop uncritically worshiping ambiguous concepts such as “Democracy,” much as our ancestors worshipped divinely-instituted systems in their day.
Ironically, the very ambitions of democratic reformers—for all that they were praiseworthy—have created a large part of the problem. For example, it’s argued that in a Democracy, government should be “accountable” to “the people:” the image, as often with Liberalism, is drawn from commerce, and so government is like a company submitting its accounts to an independent body for scrutiny. Yet attempts to operationalise this idea have gone nowhere. Other than elections (which have their own problems) and referenda (which might produce the wrong answer) there is really no practical way for this to happen, nor any useful definition of what “the people” is supposed to mean in this context. So the answer is a purely performative, symbolic one, with various members of the PMC acting in different roles in different structures, claiming to represent the interests of “the people,” or these days more likely some defined part of it.
This creates a problem that did not exist in the past, and in some places still doesn’t. When you have a government that doesn’t claim to be “accountable,” such as a one-party state, a religious dictatorship or a military regime, peoples’ expectations are correspondingly limited. So far as we can tell, people living under such regimes generally accept them as “legitimate” in the most mundane of senses, since they are based on power, and so they try to stay out of trouble with the authorities. Indeed, in the case of many regimes—the former Soviet Union, for example—the regime was just “there:” legitimacy as such was not really the issue. In many other countries, “accountability” means something much more definite and concrete: you vote for your local politician and your local politician looks after your interests. Political theory is seldom involved.
As a general rule, the more you praise “Democracy,” the more you assert that it has to be defended, the more you vilify those who are “threatening” it, then the better you had make it work, if you are to retain public sympathy and support. But the reality is that in most western countries today, the alleged benefits of “Democracy” are seldom obvious, and yet people are being asked to give up their freedom of voting choice, notionally in order to protect a system in which they have largely lost faith. That is the fundamental fundamental political problem of western political systems today. But then why should the people have lost faith so completely in their political system?
We should begin by recognising that the present situation is abnormal. Democracy as a concept has never been entirely clear, nor always easy to implement, but people have nonetheless tried. The concept of popular sovereignty was extracted, like teeth, from the ruling class during the nineteenth century, with blood, suffering, industrial confrontation and even mass violence. In particular, as middle-class liberals began to accede to power, they turned out to be just as violent and ruthless in defending their new privileges as the old royalist systems had been, not least because their power was based not on custom, religion and tradition, but on wealth and access to repressive force. And of course traditional social and financial power structures were still present, the media was a major distorting factor, and so forth. Nonetheless, for a period of several generations, you could vote for one of a range of parties with distinct ideologies, in a political system where ideology was debated, in the confidence that if your party was elected it would behave differently from the other parties. We have become so used now to the rule of The Party since the 1990s that we have forgotten—if we ever knew—that this was possible, at least to a degree.
Now when I say “ideology” here, I mean it in the sense of arguments about issues that affect the lives of ordinary people, not questions like homosexual marriage. Traditionally, parties differed over things like taxation, control of the economy, education, transport, healthcare, the sharing of power between local and national levels and a dozen other things. In most countries, different parties still have different views on some of these issues, but it makes little practical difference. In general, governments have now given away the tools they used to have that enabled them to influence how the economy functioned, and are thus unable, unwilling or both, to do very much to address the problems of ordinary people. Ordinary people, not being stupid, have noticed this.
Unable to address these problems, then, the political class has opted instead to blame the victims. In recent years, it has been somewhat hallucinatory to watch all those subjects which used to be the bread-and-butter of democratic politics unceremoniously dumped in a rubbish-bin labelled “extreme Right.” I used to keep a mental list of some of the most absurd “extreme Right” things people were charged with in France (an interest in the traditions of their native region, perhaps, organising community festivals, expressing concern about the falling birthrate?) In effect, every subject that the Party doesn’t know how to deal with, or has no solution for, or which would risk bits of the Party fighting each other, is simply treated as though it didn’t exist, and even talking about the subject is believed to somehow strengthen the “extreme Right.” The result is that the Party quite deliberately refuses to discuss the issues which people believe are the most important, and vilifies anyone who tries to do so.
What I call the Party here—the majority of the modern western political class—is not absolutely united, of course, but it is united on the things that matter. It saves its vicious disputes for other subjects. This produces a bizarre situation of ideological rigidity and sterility. On the one hand, there is only one correct view on issues such as taxation, open borders, trade and investment etc. and dissenters will be expelled from the Party. On the other hand, there are violent internal divisions on many social issues: not necessarily just for or against, but on the importance of one lobby compared to another. I have long argued that political Liberalism was bound to wind up here. By taking the politics out of politics, by creating a “professional” political class which was ignorant of anything else and lacked any relevant experience of life, and by reducing political life itself to a struggle for popularity and status within the Party, it was virtually inevitable that the Party would not only lose touch with the electorate, but also come to despise them, and, lacking any sense of solidarity, to despise each other.
Which is where we come back to the question of legitimacy. It has been tackled in a number of different ways, since the idea of a system incorporating, or at least designed by, religious powers was abandoned. To the question, Why should I obey the State? there have been a number of answers, and for most of the secular era in the West the answer was a confused mixture of inherited deference, pragmatism, deference to more educated and intelligent people, custom and habit, identification with political doctrines, the belief that the State was working in their favour, and the need for protection. In countries where the Church was strong, where the Army was influential, or both, large sections of the population also saw the State as preserver and defender of their way of life.
Beyond this, of course, revolutionary regimes claimed legitimacy from the very fact of revolution. The classic example is the Soviet Union, whose government claimed at various points to represent the interests not only of the working class of its own country, but other countries as well. Governments of “national liberation” frequently made the same claims: the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe lived off this argument for decades, and such legitimacy as the shadowy power structure in Algeria still enjoys comes from ruthless repeated playing of the Independence card, although the vast majority of the population was born after 1962, and most younger people just want to emigrate. Alternatively, governments in a number of Islamic countries proclaim their legitimacy in following the teachings of Islam, not in public consent. At the other end of the spectrum, right-wing governments, like those of Franco in Spain or Pinochet in Chile have asserted legitimacy because of their supposed role in “saving the nation” from chaos and Communism.
For its part, then until the last generation or so, the governing class of most western nations had at least some claims to the kind of legitimacy that comes from competence, experience and having already done things in life. Indeed, many politicians had already been successful in other careers outside, or had been through epic experiences like the Second World War or other political crises. Not far from where I once worked in Paris, there was a plaque on an apartment building recording the name of someone who had lived there wth the laconic description Résistant, Déporté, Ministre. I can’t remember who it was now, but it doesn’t really matter: such plaques are everywhere, recording an entire generation of politicians, once resistance fighters, deported to camps like Buchenwald, returning to help rebuild their countries. (What would the equivalent be today, I wonder: Consultant, Politician, Millionaire perhaps?)
But today’s political class and its PMC scavengers can’t make any such claims. University, NGO, Political “Adviser,” party functionary, elected politician …. For the most part, there is nothing to them. But there’s nothing holding them all together either, in any collective political identity. Consider: fifty years ago you might be a local businessman living in a small country town. Your natural inclinations were conservative without being ideological, you read a right-wing newspaper, you were a member of the local branch of your main right-wing political party, although you treated it more as a social club and a way of meeting clients. So when a local party official asked whether you’d considered turning to politics, the context, the ideology, such as it was, the organisation and the contacts were all there. Or maybe you were a trades union official, once a skilled craftsman, with a great deal of experience in negotiation, in public speaking and in life more generally. You are close to the local branch of the main left-wing party, and when somebody asks you if you had ever thought of politics, then, once more, the choices seem natural ones.
These days, fledgling members of the PMC treat political parties as they might treat prospective employers. If a group of them wind up working in the same party, it’s out of shared ambition. Nothing unites them except the urge to power, and they have nothing to offer any electorate apart from tired clichés, and an aggressive pose of vacuous moral superiority. They agree with their notional opponents on most major issues, they are prepared to abandon any remaining principles if the need arises, and they generally despise the electorate anyway. The few skills they have, are not the traditional ones of politics, but those of climbing the greasy pole, finding and sucking up to patrons, knifing rivals and learning the skills needed to progress in the party. In fact, these skills are very close to those found in a one-party state, where all that counts for the ambitious is climbing up the Party hierarchy.,
In practice, therefore speeches, tweets, publications such as they are, are not meant to help win elections, or even necessarily make the politician concerned better known to the public: they are in general part of the internal political struggle to accede to the highest positions. Thus, it is common, even normal, for a successful machine politician to appear on the national stage and be immediately overwhelmed by one of the standard crises of political life. If you want a simple encapsulation of why our current political class has made such a disaster of Covid, Ukraine and Iran, well there it is.
This produces a crisis of legitimacy that our current western political systems have no answer to. Yet they have to win elections somehow, and most are uneasily aware that consigning all political movements other than theirs, as well as all traditional political concerns, to the basket of the “extreme Right” isn’t working very well. On the other hand, actually addressing the concerns of ordinary people is beyond their competence, and even arguing about how to do so would bring internal political bloodshed on a massive scale. This is hardly surprising, since they are, after all, politicians who live overwhelmingly in a symbolic, performative world: almost a Platonic, Idealist one, where only abstract ideas have power. Arguments about the practical consequences of their normative ideas (No Borders! for example) are simply not allowed, and those who ask practical questions are either of the “extreme Right” or have been duped into “playing their game.” Ultimate reality is symbolic, not, um, real.
Insofar as our current political class and its PMC parasites have an ideology, this is it. It has no coherence, but is a mishmash of normative special pleading by interest groups, and operations mounted by grievance entrepreneurs who have spotted a gap in the market. To succeed, aspiring Party politicians have to respect the sensitivities of all these groups, even when they contradict each other. Rather than compromise and a collective effort to win power, this system encourages fissionary competitive radicalism, since the way to the top of your group is to be more extreme than anybody else, and then to demand that your Party leaders respect you, rather than someone less radical. Making a fool of yourself or being shown to be wrong doesn’t matter: there is no bad publicity.
In general terms, and beyond a bit of appropriated rhetoric, there is nothing behind these ideas, and that is why the Party does not seriously try to defend its position, but to abuse its critics. It has no argument for its ever-changing list of imperatives than Because We Say So. The Party and its PMC servants know, without examination, that their opinions are Right. (They must be by definition, because they are the opinions they hold.) The opinions of the rest of us are Not Right, when they differ from theirs. Knowledge, experience, even education are less important than having the Right thoughts. And because their arguments are Right, public opinion and even brute facts are irrelevant. Ukraine will win because that is Right. Uncontrolled immigration is Good because it is.
I don’t think we have ever been in the position before of a ruling political class with a void in its skull where its brain ought to be. Even the Nazis had an ideology of some sort. But the belief that all important political actions are performative, and that the only real political questions are symbolic ones, reduces the Party to a crowd of bickering symbol manipulators, united only by their collective hatred of those who insist that life has real problems to be solved.
The inability of the Party to understand Real Life , and to abuse those who want them to address it, is obvious at all levels, and results logically enough from an incapacity to understand anything except symbols and performance. Nothing is ultimately real, everything is manageable with a Powerpoint presentation. The most powerful example is the challenge of Political Islam, now making considerable inroads into immigrant communities in Europe especially among the young. The idea that people could believe a religion is literally true, that they would act violently on that belief, that they want to see religious law replacing civil law, and that they see secular states as abominations to be destroyed, represent too many impossible things to believe before breakfast. Reality, surely, cannot actually be like that. My brain hurts. The PMC’s only frameworks of analysis are symbolic and performative. To suggest that these people believe what they say is Islamophobic: the role of immigrants is to be patronised as symbolic victims and then to vote the right way. Ironically, one of the few actual ideologies denying democratic ideas is misunderstood, and downplayed because Racism.
Like Political Islam, like Immigration, there’s a whole raft of everyday subjects which must Not Be Discussed, because even mentioning them could somehow benefit the “extreme Right.” Issues such as education, healthcare, unemployment, and everyday security are full of traps which the “extreme Right” could spring, so they are better not discussed. And if the Party actually had to discuss any of these issues at more than a symbolic level, the utter emptiness and vapidity of their thought and of their alleged moral superiority would become cruelly apparent.
They hate us but they need us to vote for them, to stop the “extreme Right” winning. So they try to harangue us and insult us into supporting them, but this is working less and less well with each passing year. Maybe the “Strong Gods” will actually return, and demand something practical be done about traditional human concerns. And guess who will ultimately benefit? Why, the “extreme Right.”
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