DEMOCRACY’S MID-LIFE CRISIS?

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 28th November 2018 15:06:55

Book Review: ‘How Democracy Ends’ by David Runciman

Publisher: Profile Books 2018

Pages: 250

Bookshop shelves are groaning under the load of new apocalyptic works predicting the imminent demise of Western Civilisation from war, depression, epidemic, climate change, oriental, Islamic or robotic conquest. David Runciman’s is very much not one of these. It could have been called instead ‘How Democracies End’, though one sympathises with his publisher’s preference for the more dramatic singular. What he actually offers is a crystal-clear account of how some real democracies failed, an analysis of possible modes of failure and the kinds of state that may replace them. He then applies this analysis to the UK, USA and Europe, arriving at a best-guess as to how close our democracies really are to collapse.

He starts by using a simplified, functionalist definition of democracy – you have a democracy if you hold regular elections and the losers accept that they have lost – so on the opening page he is watching the 2017 Presidential Inauguration of Donald Trump with a group of his American students. Levity turns to horror at Trump’s Mussolini-style victory speech, and the obvious discomfort of Bush, Obama, Clinton and the military chiefs on the platform. But the speech was only rhetoric, however distasteful, the Democrats had accepted the election result, and Trump remains POTUS for now. Only once in US history had the losers refused, in 1861, and that started the Civil War. As Runciman pithily puts it “democracy is civil war without the fighting”.

Chapter 1 dissects the event that most frequently ends a democracy, the coup. Ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy and also of the coup, with Peisistratos’ seizure of power in 561 BC. Runciman examines more recent Greek history as one of his test cases: the 1967 Colonels’ Coup was a classic coup d’etat with tanks in the street, marshal music on the TV and arrests of the government and opponents, and he contrast this with the events of 2015 during the country’s financial collapse, to illustrate that there’s more than one way to do coup.

Following a classification invented by US political scientist Nancy Bermeo, he identifies six types: the classic military coup d’etat; the Executive Coup where those already in power suspend elections; Election-day Fraud; the Promissory Coup that calls an election to legitimise its rule; Executive Aggrandisement that chips away democratic freedoms; and Strategic Manipulation via gerrymandering and voter suppression but short of actual fraud (very topical).

In July 2015 the left-leaning Syriza government held a referendum that granted them a popular mandate to defy the EU, demand debt relief and threaten default. The European Commission, Central Bank and IMF counter-attacked by threatening to close Greek banks – no government can survive the cash machines shutting down. Finance minister Varoufakis resigned and Syriza capitulated, introducing swingeing austerity. Both Varoufakis and Runciman describe this as an almost-coup, where governmental authority is subverted by financial pressure but democracy survives, after a fashion. Runciman draws an important observation from this 1967/2015 comparison: traditionally coup plotters needed to let everyone know the government had been deposed, but nowadays they will instead try to conceal the transfer of real power.

The examination of coups leads on naturally to a discussion of populism, which is coming to dominate democratic politics everywhere. Runciman asserts that the essence of populism, of both left and right, is a belief that democracy has been stolen from the people by elites, and that claiming it back means flushing these elites out from spider-like hiding places. Hence the logic of populism is the conspiracy theory, the promulgation of which has been greatly facilitated by the rise of social media. He identifies the 1890s (Gilded Age) and late-1940s/early-50s (start of Cold War) as previous periods when conspiracy theories were as rife as they are today, with a nod to Richard Hofstadter’s superb study ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’. As to the causes of rising populism, economic distress, too rapid technological change, rising economic inequality and the absence of war are the main factors.

Shocking as it may seem, war patently favours democratic patriotism over populism, by temporarily suppressing private economic interest, and Runciman examines the different ways that democracy fought off populism before WW1 and after WW2. The populist rage of the 1900s didn’t simply evaporate under Theodore Roosevelt, Lloyd George and Jaures but morphed into both social democracy and fascism in the interwar period. Back then democracy was quite limited, leaving plenty of headroom for its reform: taxes were low; welfare states had yet to be built; unions, political parties and the state were still trusted. None of those conditions apply today.

Runciman’s central thesis is that the appeal of modern democracies is twofold, to both personal dignity and public good. Citizens of a democracy have their views taken seriously (even if later thwarted), and they also reap material benefit from stability, prosperity and peace. However problems arise because dignity is an immediate individual benefit while the material benefits are public, shared (increasingly unequally) and long-term – we come to value our individual dignity higher than the long-term benefits, as witnessed in own-foot-shooting episodes like Trump and Brexit. In the chapter ‘Something Better?’ Runciman applies this thesis to alternatives to democratic government, asserting that the gap between what’s promised to individuals and what to society as a whole is what distinguishes these alternatives.

For example Marxism-Leninism promised to collapse the gap, making personal and political lives the same. Bolsheviks at first believed this would render state power and police force unnecessary, but the result, Stalinism, hardly bore out such a belief. 21st century authoritarian regimes promise instead collective, rather than personal, dignity through nationalism. Material rewards are delivered by economic growth, steered by the state in the case of the Chinese Communist Party, or by ‘trickle down’ in a free market (Trump’s magic MAGA spell). Runciman describes this as “pragmatic authoritarianism”, which also describes Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Hungary and more. It appears to be spreading as fast as was once hoped for democracy.

Another dangerously tempting alternative is epistocracy – rule by experts – which eliminates the personal dignity factor altogether by in effect saying “you’re too dumb to vote because modern societies are just too complex”. It may sometimes look as though we’re there already, since our career politicians are skilled only in political maneuvering and depend upon consultants and experts to run things. However, in what is perhaps the most important section of the book, Runciman carefully distinguishes between epistocracy and technocracy.

Epistocracy has been around ever since Plato complained that democracy meant rule by the ignorant. Versions of it predated most modern democracies, in the shape of limited suffrage. Runciman stresses that true democracy with universal suffrage imposes no conditions on the knowledge or skill of voters, only the condition that they stick around to suffer the consequences of their own mistakes. This is what, in principle if not always in fact, gives it the power to learn and adapt. Technocracy isn’t really rule at all but more of a service through which rulers call upon those experts – from economists to high-tech engineers – who built the machine that is society, to maintain and repair it. These experts can’t and shouldn’t decide whether the machine needs replacing (or even shutting down), and so technocracy can and does co-exist with either democracy or authoritarianism.

Maintaining its twofold benefit is, for Runciman, the positive virtue of democracy, but its equally important negative virtue is the power to (eventually) throw out politicians and governments who don’t deliver. Against the more alarmist commentators, he believes that the positive virtue is currently under more threat than the negative. Globalising digital technologies both enable and encourage divisive demands for personal respect, pushing towards ‘identity politics’ and anarchism, while simultaneously destroying jobs and demanding more and more technical expertise to solve social and economic problems.

Anarchy is therefore another alternative to democracy, perhaps arising after some disaster, nuclear or climatic, or else actively courted by libertarians of both right and left – though the Silicon Valley titans who rejoice in the power of their new technologies to disrupt traditional capitalism prefer to be called accelerationists rather than anarchists. Runciman is not a tech-utopian like Paul Mason or Yuval Noah Harari, but he deals fairly, intelligently and in some depth with potential tech futures, concluding that some will be “wondrous, some terrible, and most wholly unknowable. It is a spectrum of possibility as wide as any human experience has ever known.” All we do know is that the benefit gap grows ever wider, and that while Trump will eventually go, Zuckerberg and his ilk will carry on, precisely because they do not threaten democracy directly, but rather indirectly by sapping our attention.

So is this an optimistic, pessimistic or apocalyptic account? None of the above: if pressed I would have to call it ‘stoical’. Marxists will object to Runciman’s lack of emphasis on class, but the eclipse of class consciousness lies at the heart of his analysis. Social Democrats may object that a Keynesian refloat of the economy could defuse populist wrath, but in his discussion of Thomas Piketty, Runciman points out that inequality on our present scale has never before in history been dispelled without the large-scale violence of revolution or world war. In his conclusion he offers no solutions, but neither does he predict that democracy is going to end suddenly and soon. Gradual erosion is more likely, at a different pace in different countries, and to different degrees. His closing words are:

“Western democracy will survive its mid-life crisis. With luck it will be a little chastened by it. It is unlikely to be revived by it. This is not, after all, the end of democracy. But this is how democracy ends”.