CHARLES TAYLOR
Let’s start off by repeating some very widely known things about the history of the word “democracy,” because they help cast light on our present predicament.
“Democracy,” as everyone knows, stopped being a pejorative term only two hundred years ago. The bad rap goes back to Aristotle. For Aristotle, democracy was the unchecked, as it were, uncontrolled, power of the demos—the demos being the nonelite of the society—over everyone else, including the elites, meaning aristocrats and those with money. Likewise, on the other side, oligarchy was unchecked control by the rich and noble. So, for Aristotle, the best society was what he called a politeia, a balance between the two, a balance of power.
Up until the eighteenth century, if you proposed democracy, including to the authors of the American Constitution, they would have said, “That’s not what we want at all.” They, too, thought in terms of balance, and they called their new polity a “republic,” which is one possible translation of Aristotle’s term: politeia is, after all, the original title of Plato’s great work, which today we call The Republic. But democracy in the late eighteenth century was really bad news.
And then suddenly it becomes our word for the most desirable society. In other words, the term that was previously defined in contrast with a “polity” or “republic”—namely, “democracy”—suddenly usurps their prestige and legitimacy. It becomes our word for what we are fighting to make the world safe for, the highest form of political life.
But this shift leaves in its wake a certain ambiguity, which we can see in the double meaning of the words we use to translate demos—that is, people, peuple, Volk, popolo, and so on. They always have two senses. On one hand, they mean the whole population of the nation, or political entity, as when we speak of the French people or Dutch people being liberated from Nazi occupation in 1944–1945. But, on the other hand, we often use the term for what the Greeks called the demos—that is, the nonelites—just as early moderns distinguished “demotic” languages from Latin and the languages of often conquering elites, or as, today, when political leaders claim that the people are being tricked, exploited, or otherwise maltreated by the elites.
Double meaning is ineliminable, because it reflects the ambition behind the word “democracy.” In the end, ideally, these two senses of the word would be fused: there would be a society ruled by the whole people, but without an elite that manages to put the rest in the shade and to operate to their disadvantage. In other terms, democracy would be a truly equal society. Democracy is a telic concept, necessarily a matter of purposes and ideals, not merely conditions or causal relations. It is defined by standards that can never be met.
So, we have different ways of identifying democracy: we say that some countries have a democracy because they have the rule of law, for example, or because they have elections in which all the people can participate. Universal suffrage is the key here, along with the requirement of “free and fair” elections, which in turn require that the media are free. But then we also frequently make another judgment about certain societies that pass the “free and fair” test, to the effect that they are very “undemocratic” because of inequalities—of income, wealth, education, class, or race—which are linked as both cause and effect with disproportionate elite power.
The electoral criterion is of an on / off kind: a country either passes the universal suffrage “free and fair” requirement, or it doesn’t. (The world is, of course, much more fuzzy, but our judgments are categorical.) But the second notion of democracy is telic.
This is a concept of what the ideal should be, what democracy should integrally realize. This would be something like a condition of ideal equality, in which all classes and groups, elites and nonelites alike, would have power proportionate to their numbers to influence and determine outcomes.1 But this defines a condition that we never fully attain—or maybe we do, for a short time, and then we slide away again. And that gives us the key to a very important dynamic in democracy, which is crucial to my first point, my first path to degeneration.
There are periods when we are moving toward democracy—liberation from foreign rule, liberation from dictatorial rule—the kind of thing that happened in 1989 in Eastern Europe, the kind of thing that seemed about to happen after Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. And something analogous occurs when there is an assertion of the power of the demos in established democracies (those who meet the electoral criterion).
There’s a great sense of enthusiasm, the sense we are moving in the right direction.
And then there are periods of lower morale, when we feel we are moving away. If you look at the two hundred years of what we now call “democracy in the West,” you see that there were many movements that seemed to be steps forward; for example, the Jacksonian Revolution of the 1820s in the United States was a kind of democratic revolution against a class of elites, against powerful landed interests. But later in the nineteenth century, new and powerful interests asserted themselves—for instance, the “robber barons” in the Gilded Age, against whom the Progressives, and later Theodore Roosevelt, reacted with antitrust legislation.
Starting in some countries in the 1930s, and continuing after the Second World War, there was a further push against unchecked industrial power, with the creation of welfare states, the strengthening of workers’ power, the adoption of policies of full employment, and other elements of social democracy. And then, since about 1975, we have been sliding in the other direction. It is this important feature—of first democratic encouragement, enthusiasm, and moving forward, and then democratic discouragement and sliding backward—to which I would like to call attention.
Part of what masks democratic degeneration is the hold of the first concept, the on / off one. It is widely associated with the renowned economist Joseph Schumpeter, for whom the people are made up of (at least theoretically) equal individuals. They all have the vote. Elites of experts and self-selected politicians actually rule.2 But the people periodically vote, and these elections are free and fair. So there is a real possibility that the incumbents can be thrown out, and there is always an alternative elite ready to take over if the present rulers falter.
Let’s call this the “contingency feature.”
This feature also has other requirements. It demands free media, open fora of exchange, the right to organize, and so on. These contribute to free and fair elections; without them the contingency requirement fails to hold. And in some variants (for instance, the US Constitution) there is an attempt to balance unbridled and direct popular will (through, for example, an electoral college made up of local elites to elect the president.)
And today in liberal thinking in the West, there is also a requirement that all be treated equally and fairly. The demand here is for inclusion, even of people who are different from the majority, ethnically, culturally, religiously.
This inclusiveness is, of course, another telic concept, a standard we never fully meet, but may be at any given time approaching or sliding away from. But in this section, I’ll be dealing with the standard directly encoded in the term “democracy”: rule of the people, the demand that nonelites have a significant role in government. I take up the issue of inclusion in the next section.
Now, we have been tempted to believe that the system just described will eventually ensure the endorsement of at least most people. And this consensus will lead (and has in fact led in some cases) to an unprecedented stability in history. Such consensually generated stability is a great reversal from the classical period and even from the late eighteenth century, as I remarked above. The American founders were wary of democracy. They still held the view that goes back to Aristotle. Democracy is rule of the people, in the sense of nonelites. Such rule would bring dangerous instability, even the spoliation of people of property, on which prosperity and civilization depended.
But this anxiety disappears in the quasi-Schumpeterian view, along with the telic concept. And the perception that democracies are stable lies behind the optimistic prognosis of established liberal thought. On this view, the secret of democracy’s appeal is that it offers the rule of law. People can live in security, because their rights are respected, and on the occasions when they aren’t, they can obtain redress in the courts. At the same time, the holding of regular elections under universal suffrage ensures that the interests, at least of the majority, can’t be totally ignored.
So, on this view, democracies can be stable in a way that other regimes can’t. Moreover, these others are bound to come under steadily increasing pressure because of widespread features of our contemporary world. The idea here is that education, the spread of media, economic change, globalization, consumer capitalism, and so on, will break people loose from older allegiances to elite power. Authoritarian countries will eventually sail into seas of instability. The only way in which these can be calmed is by introducing democracy. Hence many predicted that even China will have one day to join the democratic club.
There is some truth to this claim. People living under the rule of law do resist losing their rights, which does make democracy more stable. But history also shows that the lure of strong rule, or the temptation to “overcome disorder,” or purge dangerous elements, can overcome the resistance.
This confident reliance on stability clearly underestimates the resources that authoritarian regimes can draw on: in particular, nationalism, a sense of historic grievance against formerly dominant Western colonial powers, a sense even of humiliation at their hands, and the feeling that these same Western powers are trying to weaken us by destroying the moral fabric of our society and its religion, fostering laxity, homosexuality, and so on. Putin is even trying to create a counter-liberal international on the basis of a common resistance to cultural-moral erosion.
What the optimistic prospect also neglects is the decay and regression within established democracies, which in turn intensifies their inability to respond to new challenges that they face. Overconfidence in the staying power of the rule of law suddenly looks rash in the age of Trump.
The Schumpeterian model seems to suppose that democracy has already irreversibly attained its highest form, so that the restrictive or class-based use of “people” can just be forgotten. Indeed, it is often claimed that it ought to be forgotten, and protagonists of egalitarian policies are often accused of waging “class war.” But what we are now seeing are the ways in which forgetting the telos crucially weakens democracy in the face of certain sorts of authoritarian challenge.
This brings me to my first path of degeneration: for a variety of reasons, democracies always have to remake their telic movement, their pursuit of specific purposes and goals. It may be because, when you move, let’s say, from the early nineteenth century to the late nineteenth century, the sources of power have changed entirely. These sources of power have changed from landed property to industrial power, and power has shifted from landed gentry to large corporations; and then the sources and beneficiaries change again: finance has a tremendously important role to play in the way we live our lives.
Or the need to remake things may arise because of complacency or backsliding when democracy is at high tide, close to its telos.
But, in any case, it is clear that we in Western democracies have been sliding backward since about 1975. We could call it the “Great Downgrade.” What has been progressively lost is a sense of citizen efficacy. I mean the sense that ordinary citizens can have in a democracy, that if they combine their efforts, they can influence government through elections, and thus redress grievances, and bring about tolerable conditions of life for themselves and their families.
The period I’m talking about saw a decline in actual citizen efficacy. And this decline translated into growing inequality; that’s the fruit of it, but it’s also the cause of it. That is why I talk about “slides,” though they are not straight descents, but have more of a spiraling effect.
One such effect is this: the more people feel they don’t have any real power in relation to the elites—that their fate is being decided elsewhere, such as by whether there is going to be employment in their area, or good and secure jobs, or affordable education for their children—the more they feel discouraged about their ability to influence these conditions and the less they vote. And, in fact, the last decades of the twentieth century saw a decline in the levels of participation in just about all Western democracies. Some started from a higher and some from a lower level of participation, but, generally speaking, the trend was downward. And, of course, that abstention increased the power of money and special interests, so the discouragement got deeper.
In the last couple of decades, electoral participation has been going up in many countries. In the United States, it reached an all-time peak in the 2020 presidential election. But this was because of the polarization that came about through what have been called “populist” challenges to liberal democracy. The challengers, such as Donald Trump, claimed to offer increased citizen efficacy, but in relation to the real grievances and inequality that nonelites suffered from, the offer was pure sham. In fact, the Trump presidency exacerbated inequality—for instance, with the tax cut of 2017—and chipped away at the Affordable Care Act.
There is a danger here for a spiraling downward—indeed, for various kinds of downward spirals, which feed on themselves.
It is worth pausing to look more closely at the changes in Western democracies since 1975, something Craig Calhoun will do in a more sustained discussion in Chapter 2. In the decades after the Second World War (in the United States starting with the New Deal), the political life of these democracies was frequently centered on a polarization between Left and Right, which brought about the development of welfare states, some nationalization and / or state economic planning, the extension of the rights and powers of organized labor, and so on. These were proposed and legislated for by parties of the Left, opposed or moderated by a main party of the Right. Political regimes were jointly created in the course of this competition / struggle. The dominant theme of these polities was a kind of tamed class struggle.
Much has changed in our societies since.
First, the tamed class struggle has been breaking down, or at least fragmenting—and for a host of reasons. One, which has in other ways been very beneficial, is the emergence of new issues that were sidelined in the old polarization, particularly those raised by the feminist movements, by environmentalists, by defenders of multiculturalism, and gay rights.
Then there is the coming of greater prosperity, which may make some people, even among nonelites, no longer feel class solidarity.
Then there is the growth of a new culture that is more individualist in certain respects. Consumerism is one aspect of this new culture; the ethic of authenticity, with its concern for identity, is another; and their effect, separately and together, is to heighten individualism.
And so, issues fragment. And the party system may also be transformed by these changes, as has happened with the rise of Green parties. The older “packages” of issues become looser, and in some cases new packages, linking lifestyle questions, come to the fore. But the change in model comes largely because people have lost faith in the first model, not just because the second has attractions.
The older sense of citizen efficacy is accordingly undermined; there is a loss of group solidarity around the original cluster, so I no longer have an obvious way of registering my goals politically and effectively. Support for the parties of the Left declines: successive age cohorts vote less for these parties, partly through lack of interest, partly through nonidentification with a party, partly through despair over one’s inefficacy.
In the first part of our period (roughly up to the 2008 crash), the despair was intensified because voting abstention tilted the system toward entrenched privileges and the status quo. The vote, in fact, declined less among those who identified with entrenched interests:
So, a sense of powerlessness in the face of bureaucrats, special interests, and elites grew. And this was intensified by the increase of economic globalization and latterly, of the power of finance to wreak havoc in our lives. All this increased the sense that our recourse, if any, was not the vote, but (perhaps) special-issue mobilization.
There are vicious circles here, downward spirals through which the sense of inefficacy decreases efficacy in fact, which in turn intensifies the sense. For example, despair over inefficacy leads to abstention and a decline in citizen participation, which as a result increases the power of money in politics. Politicians rely more heavily on expensive television because they lack a “ground game”; a fragmented society, with less mobilization, means that we need media more.
But the greater power of money, exercised through the oligopoly of media, makes the whole process less transparent, which in turn objectively reduces the efficacy of citizen action, which in turn increases despair—and the cycle starts again.
Then the gap between rich and poor widens. The middle class shrinks.4 There are fewer steady jobs. And there don’t seem to be mechanisms to reverse this trend.
The sense of equal citizenship, which is partly a matter of self-understanding, fades as the experience of acting together or even being in each other’s presence becomes rarer. People in ghettos, on the one hand, and in gated communities, on the other, have trouble imagining themselves as partners in a democratic exercise.5
The power of the ideal of equal citizenship is then deflected by ideologies of unworthiness. The rich and successful come to believe that those drawing welfare, food stamps, and other subsidies don’t really live up to the ethic of self-reliance so prominent in North America and therefore don’t deserve to be full citizens along with them.6 Hence the attempts by right-wing parties (US Republicans, Canadian Conservatives) to make it difficult to get to the polls.
These are self-feeding spirals. We are not only in an era of democratic regression, in which the telos recedes; but it seems that the decline is self-feeding. It is hard to see how to stop it.
The spirals lead to a falling-off of confidence in the representative system as a vehicle for redress of the grievances of nonelites. This has set in motion various vicious circles of decline. I want to list them more tersely.
First, the fall in voter participation, mainly on the part of nonelites, and / or the declining support for parties of the Left has increased the influence of the better off, and also that of money in politics. I am thinking not only of voting, but also of citizen participation in campaigns. The less participation there is, the greater the importance of television, and hence the need for money.
Some of this is still (legally) above board, but today’s condition approaches what the North and West sneeringly call “corruption,” or “crony capitalism,” when it appears in the East and South. And when nonelites begin to participate more, there are often efforts to restrict this.
Voter participation has been worsened by, second, a rise in inequality, the gap between rich and poor, which narrowed between the Gilded Age and what the French call les trente glorieuses and then began to draw apart again at an ever-accelerating rate. This has been due both to (a) globalization, or the lowering of trade barriers and the (b) attendant flight of manufacturing from high- to low-wage sites, and to the accelerating automation of many functions. The effects of both developments in the richer democracies have been aggravated by the blind ideological trust on the part of governments, even of the Left, in neoliberalism: the basic proposition that, if markets are free, the benefits of growth will always trickle down (a rising tide lifts all ships). Consequently, such attempts as were made to counteract the effects of globalization and automation through education, job retraining, adequate welfare provision, stimulus packages, and the like were inadequate. Lack of effective response by governments increased the sense among nonelites that they have no real say in the system, and hence lowered the vote further (at least until they had a charismatic champion to rally around).
Then, third, frustration takes the form of action altogether outside the representative system. Protest movements are often without effect, precisely because they have no impact on the vote (Occupy in Wall Street) or they propose to step outside the system altogether (5-star in Italy).
Then, fourth, the seeming incapacity of social-democratic parties to rectify the economic and employment condition of nonelites opens the way for a new definition of the drive toward the telos of democracy, in which the “people” is now defined culturally or religiously, and its target is the “other,” but its political enemies are the liberal and multicultural elites. We see this dynamic virtually everywhere today in Western democracies. Of course, this is the basis of another downward spiral, because the programs of these populist movements can do nothing to remedy poverty and unemployment. They can only divide the demos, defined as the ensemble of disadvantaged nonelites.
Then, on top of these four spirals, there seems to be a “dumbing down” of electorates, in the sense that the grasp of the issues and of what is related to what declines among great swaths of the population. Am I wrong, dreaming of a past that never existed, when I say that previous cohorts of US voters in the postwar period would have laughed off the idea that stimulus packages won’t increase employment, or (even crazier) that reducing taxes on the super-rich will automatically increase employment? How better to respond to the “voodoo economics” introduced by Reagan and echoed by Bush W., and Trump? This is paradoxical, because electorates in the West are by formal criteria better educated than ever before.
But in fact, it will prove more fruitful if we examine this phenomenon from the other direction and speak of the growing opacity of the representative system.
In speaking of growing opacity, I am not assuming that total transparency existed in some earlier period, such as immediately after the Second World War. The existence of waves of irrationality such as that of the McCarthy era contradicts this assumption. But the term attempts to capture the phenomenon that certain matters that were relatively obvious to previous generations have been lost from view—a forgetfulness that allowed some during the Tea Party campaign against the Affordable Care Act to say things like “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”7
But perhaps this increased opacity is an inevitable consequence of disengagement from the representative political system; what doesn’t seem to work is not worth following closely. But even for those who don’t turn away from the system, who would very much like to engage, but can’t see how they can have an impact, the frustrating opacity of the system can make them vulnerable to savior figures who promise to restore (how is never specified) a better past.
I don’t think that disengagement from the political system is the only cause here; I will return to this below. But to the extent that disengagement plays a part, it is both cause and effect of increasing opacity; hence we have a fifth spiral.
In many Western societies, this opacity leads to the surrender of mainstream political debate to the mythologies of neoliberalism, which of course further diminishes the ability of the system to help nonelites. This spiral number six is manifest in retrenchments of the social supports put in place to support nonelites when their interests were better represented in politics. As US president, for example, Bill Clinton proposed legislation to “end welfare as we have known it.”8 The Republican-dominated legislature passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which indeed dramatically eroded America’s once-robust safety net. Despite Republican assertions that welfare recipients are major backers of the Democratic Party, in general, the “beneficiaries” of welfare (there ought to be a word “maleficiaries” for this situation) vote less often than the better off. Getting involved in politics would only drain energy from their daily struggles to find work and avoid hunger or eviction—and it didn’t seem to promise much help.
It is worth examining the motor behind spiral five above, what I’ve been calling the “increasing opacity” effect. What underlies this is a complex of causes. One of these is unquestionably the growing control of big money over media (Murdoch and Fox News) and their growing irresponsibility (lately illustrated by their treatment of Trump during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, which gave a great boost to circulation, but the media could also have helped point out when people were lying or saying absurd things).
At the same time there has also taken place a fragmentation of audiences, so that lots of people never encounter dissenting opinion. On one hand, we have seen a gradual movement apart of different media to constitute “echo chambers,” so that older forms of confrontation of clashing ideas cease to take place. On the other, the rise of social media as sources of information and opinion intensify the creation of such echo chambers. The effects of all this are exacerbated by the inflow of fake news, which circulates in one echo chamber and is never confronted by the “truths” circulating in others. This effect has facilitated what appears to be an extraordinary spread of belief in wild and implausible conspiracy theories, such as QAnon.
Michael Warner, a theorist of the public sphere, points out a shift in the nature of the exchange flowing through social media, that it tilts toward the autobiographical, even the narcissistic: “Your political posts sit next to photos of your dog as presentations of self.”9 What are the cumulative effects of this tendency?
In addition to the factors mentioned above, opacity has partly been thickened by institutional changes, which have conspired to make our society less readable.10 As pointed out above, if you have a big party on the Left and a big party on the Right, each with general programs, you have a pretty good idea that, if you vote this way, there is going to be more welfare, and if you vote that way, there’s going to be less. But now there is much more fragmentation, with movements of various kinds—ecological, feminism, gay rights—so policy options and alternatives are less legible. And it is often less clear how one should vote if one seeks a certain outcome.
This greater opacity is certainly part of the reason for the decline in felt citizen efficacy, which leads on one hand to greater abstention and on the other to a diminished understanding of how our system works. And in this case, the misfortune and the irony is that it was partly brought about by the rise of social movements such as those just mentioned in the last paragraph, which represented for the most part a gain for democracy, in the sense that important causes and long-standing grievances began to count in a way they hadn’t in the past, and the voices of LGBTQ people, women, the handicapped, and others at last began to have some impact.
But there is another reason for the decline in transparency, which is less benign, and that is the growing power over our institutions of the belief in unfettered markets as engines of a growth, which ultimately redound to the benefit of everybody. Since the late 1970s neoliberal ideas have steadily gained hegemony over many Western democracies, and even now when the follies of reduced regulation became plain in the crash of 2008, these illusions still have power.
It is only very recently, with the coming of the Covid pandemic in 2019, that the true costs of neoliberalism have been revealed—in underfunded health systems, inadequate provision for the elderly, glaring inequalities that have left certain groups much more vulnerable than others.
But the grip of this kind of fantasy is perhaps less surprising when we take into account a fundamental feature of modern democracy as against ancient democracy. In ancient Athens, when the ecclesia met it was dominated by the demos, and when it voted to do x or y, the outcome was the will of the people. And it may be that they thought afterward that it was a terrible thing that they had done, but it clearly had been their will. But in our rule-of-law, complex, representative systems, it is often very hard to be sure if the will of the people is being listened to or not. Intrinsically, there is a tendency for democratic decision-making to become more opaque as it becomes less open to the nonelites’ participation. At the same time that the people don’t vote, they also tune out, and they become less and less clear as to what is actually happening.
That means that they are very open to various kinds of appeal, which more knowledgeable people see as totally magic thinking—take “I’m going to make America great again,” as an example. But that is another way in which the spiral can continue downward.
In any case, the neoliberal illusion has opened the road to certain policies that have done great damage to the livelihood of large segments of the population in Western democracies. One such policy has been the globalization of trade—that is, the lowering of trade barriers. This of itself has been of great benefit to developing countries and has helped to reduce world rates of poverty. But it ought to have been accompanied by national policies to ensure that its benefits were more widely and equally shared within the industrialized nations. The unthinking faith in the market helped to blind governments to the need for such policies (but fortunately, not universally so; some European, especially Scandinavian, social democracies have had greater success in this area). And so the chickens are now coming home to roost, as the populations of various “rust belts” and other neglected areas in the United States and Europe rise up and demand a reckoning.
If we look at the three factors mentioned here that have helped carry our Western democracies away from the pattern of politics of the postwar period (and there are obviously others)—namely, social movements, the spread of neoliberalism, and globalized trade—it becomes clear how fragile the gains of any such period of advance toward democracy’s telos can be. They are always vulnerable to largely unpredictable changes in economy, culture, and shifting ideologies. No formula for a successful democracy can be forever valid.
Once a departure occurs from the positive equilibrium of social democracy, the various spirals mentioned above kick in and, in the absence of wise and effective remedial action, carry us even farther away from our telos and in fact strengthen elite hegemony. This is one way in which democracy is susceptible to a degeneration, to losing its nature. It would be different if departure from the telos automatically produced a move to rectify things, but on the contrary, the self-feeding spirals tend to aggravate the departure.
We should have no illusions: nonvoters may affect a kind of cynical indifference, but in fact, a great many of them feel cheated of their birthright. This feeling can be seen in the great power of slogans such as Obama’s “Yes, we can” of 2008. (And we can note also that one of the parties that emerged from the Spanish Indignados movement is called “Podemos.”) Many nonparticipants show themselves eager to take part anew if they see a chance to have an effect. Recent mobilizations in many Western democracies are a testament to this. New voters were important to Democratic success in the US midterm elections of 2018; they were important to record turnout for each side in the 2020 presidential election. New participants include the young—and teenagers are leading the way on climate change. But they are by no means limited to the young.
For many, the lack of citizen efficacy is felt as a deprivation; this is part of what it means to say that democracy, as it is imagined and lived by many in our civilization, is a telic concept.
In addition, the workings of our system have inflicted great losses on some sections of the population. In the context of more globalized trade, and also automation, advanced economies have suffered loss of regular, potentially full-time jobs; many can find only precarious and / or part-time jobs. For many workers this has meant a decline in living standards and for the societies concerned a growth in inequality. In the old days, right after the war, this would have led to an increase in the vote of the major left party or parties. But traditional left parties seem incapable of channeling this discontent. We see this in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, among other countries. In the European case, the crisis of 2008 triggered off austerity policies in most member states of the European Union. Some were what orthodox budgeting required, given the debt crisis and the lack of room for maneuver for countries tied into the same (euro) currency. Some were voluntary and ideologically driven. Austerity measures have exacerbated the plight of the less well off, but social-democratic parties were either unable or unwilling to offer an alternative. Rather the discontent has led to the surge of populist votes, aided of course by the obfuscations promoted by Koch Brothers’ funding, Sky News, and others.
Indeed, the power of neoliberal mythology, backed by the fear of trade competition from other societies, has inhibited the proposal and carrying through of the kind of program that would cope with the crisis of good jobs: more investment in retraining; better support for workers and their children in times of unemployment; stimulus packages building infrastructure; expansion of public services; including health, education, and care for the old (see Chapter 7). On the contrary, the emphasis has been on reducing taxes, or at least not raising them, on the grounds that this is the royal road to increasing employment; but then this policy has often led to an exaggerated insistence on austerity programs—see especially Europe after 2008.
So the West has seen a decline of “Fordist” industries, which had lifetime employees with benefits. From Fordist worker to precarious part-timer: this has been the fate of many workers or their children—a fate that amounts to a Great Downgrade of our time. This affects many people and some whole areas. These include the “rust belts,” formerly the site of large-scale manufacturing, now in decline, as well as small towns and rural areas, which have also been left behind. Economic development in many Western societies in the last half-century has brought about a concentration of economic activities and job growth in a few large cities. Small centers have lost not only population, but many of their former institutions, among them frequently the local newspaper.11 Many of the people living in these areas face the daunting prospect of downward social mobility for themselves and their children.
One might argue that we have gained something in compensation for our losses. I argued above that one of the reasons for the decline of the old left–right pattern of politics in the West was the rise of social movements such as feminism, LGBTQ rights, ecological responsibility, and the like. These have pushed us closer to what we recognize as another telos, or major objective, of liberal democracy—namely, the creation of a more equal and inclusive society, or, put negatively, the removal of certain serious and long-existing exclusions or inegalitarian hierarchical inclusions (such as that of women in patriarchal modes of life).
But we can’t consider these two developments as an overall gain, or even a shift in which the losses are fully compensated by the gains. And that is because the responses to the Great Downgrade have very clearly and palpably called the gains of inclusion into question. This is one of the shocking conclusions that contemporary events force us to face. The “populist” revolts (we will soon have reason to question this term) have done great damage to nonhierarchical inclusion.
Let us turn now to these revolts and examine why democracies are susceptible to them. This is the subject of the next section.
The second path to degeneration I want to talk about is the move toward (or the power gained by) various movements of exclusion—that is, movements that say that certain members of the polis, certain members of the republic, aren’t really members of the republic. This is another basic susceptibility of modern democracy that I think we need to look at more closely.
Democratic republics require a very definite sense of identity: Americans, Canadians, Québécois, German, French, and so on. Why? Well, because for several reasons, the very nature of democracy requires this strong commitment: it requires participation in voting, participation in paying taxes, participation in going to war, if there is conscription. If there is to be redistribution, there has to be a very profound solidarity to motivate transfers from the more to the less fortunate. Democracy therefore requires a strong common identity.
Finally, and very importantly, if we are in a deliberative community—we are talking together, deciding among ourselves, voting, and making decisions—we have to trust that the other members of the group are really concerned with our common good.
You see a situation arising where independentist movements start very easily—and I happen to know a case like that, coming from Quebec—in which the minority says, “Well when they’re talking about the good of our society, they’re not talking about us; they’re talking just about them. We’re not part of their horizon.” When that kind of trust breaks down, democracy is in very big trouble. It can even end up splitting into two. So, we need a powerful common identity.12
But these powerful identities can slip very easily in a negative and exclusionary direction. A very good book by the Yale sociologist Jeff Alexander, The Civic Sphere,13 makes this point: the common properties that make up this identity are very strongly morally charged; they’re good. As a matter of fact, in most contemporary democratic societies, there are two aspects to this identity: one is defined by certain principles—that we believe in representative democracy, human rights, equality—but they also have a specific character: as a citizen, I am engaged in a particular historical project aimed at realizing these principles. Canadians, Americans, French, Germans—each of us believes in our national project, which is meant to embody these values. This is what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas is referring to with the term “constitutional patriotism.”14
It’s easy to see how this take on principles can generate exclusion. Recall the infamous speech by Mitt Romney in the 2012 US presidential election that helped bring his defeat at the hands of Obama. It contained the “47 percent” remark: 47 percent of the people are just passengers; they are being given what they need; they are not really producing; they are taking from the common stock, without adding to it. The underlying moral idea is that the real American is productive, enterprising, self-reliant. The allegation is that 47 percent of the people are not living up to the stringent requirement of this idea. So, these people are not behaving like real Americans.
A little reflection would show how false this particular moralization is: many of the people who receive state aid, welfare, say, or food stamps, are clearly doing their best to take care of themselves and their families; many of them are working, albeit at ill-paid jobs; while, on the other side, many of those whom this calculation includes in the other 53 percent owe their prosperity to luck or their parents or some form of inherited wealth.
This false moralization is not innocent. It provides the justification for a lot of measures in many settings—including efforts by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to roll back rights to free speech and media access, which, happily, were blocked by the public. False moralization is prominent on the American Right—for example in presenting voter suppression as the promotion of honesty, in ignoring the racial and other discriminations implicit in shifting demands for specific kinds of identification, and so on. Such false moralization could be a totally cynical move, but it is one that is probably justified by the sense that the people excluded fail to live up to the moral requirements of citizenship as we (good, upstanding, self-reliant citizens) define them.
Or you can get another kind of exclusion: in varying combinations, ethnicity and history provide the criteria. There are the people who really belong to the ethnicity that defines “our” identity, and then there are the people who came along later. There are the people who have always been here, in contrast to the immigrants who came later. What is operative here is basically an ethnic coding. And here, this slide to exclusion can occur.
Take Quebec: What’s behind the identity expressed in “Je suis Québécois?” In one sense, there is a very powerful ethnic story behind that: seventy thousand French-speakers were left on the banks of the St. Lawrence when the British conquest occurred and was ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. And then they built what is now this vibrant French-speaking society of 8 million. This is the result of a highly successful fight for survival. It’s a very easy slide from a definition of “Québécois” as a citizen of Quebec today to a narrower concept, including only what we call Québécois de souche—old-stock Québécois. The memory of the struggle to survive, and the fears surrounding it, can encourage that narrowing. And as a matter of fact, it is not uncommon for long-established populations to react with fear when people of unfamiliar cultures and customs arrive. The reaction to the arrival of Sikhs and Muslims in Quebec was often the anxious question “Est-ce qu’ils vont nous changer?” “Will they change us?”
In our present epoch when human rights are taken for granted, this question is often asked in a new key: not only in fear, but also often with indignation. That’s because the reason for discomfort that says simply “they make me uneasy” sounds too weak to justify measures of exclusion. One needs some serious moral reason. And so these days new arrivals are often labeled as threats to our basic principles. Thus xenophobic movements in many Western societies can suddenly take on new strength when they frame the outsiders as homophobic and antifeminist—as we saw for example in the Netherlands with the demonization of Muslim immigrants by Pym Fortuyn, a politician who used his gay identity to deflect accusations that he was part of the far Right. Fortuyn was assassinated, and his campaign taken up by Geert Wilders in a mounting series of wild exaggerations.15
Of course, it is true that the progress toward gay liberation and male–female equality that has been made in the Western world has not been matched in Islamic societies. Still, Islamophobic campaigns not only spread an essentialist view of Islam, but also affirm against the evidence that all Muslims share this view. Above all, they seriously misrepresent the outlook of Muslims in the Western world.
The calumnies both reflect fear and inflame it, and they offer a temptation that certain demagogues cannot resist. They produce a modernized xenophobia, one that is evident not only in the Netherlands, but also in France. When Marine Le Pen wrested control of the Front National from her anti-Semitic father, she renamed it Rassemblement National and aligned it more with contemporary views on several subjects including gay rights. Suspicion of outsiders, which used to be a mainstay of the Right, now gains strength from some supporters of women’s and gay rights, which used to be the preserve of the liberal Left.
A similar kind of reversal has occurred in the social and economic sphere, where “populist” demagogues claim to be the defenders of workers against political elites, including parties of the center Left who used to act unchallenged in this role of defenders, on the grounds that these elites are favoring outsiders over the real, native “people.” This line has been exploited with great success by Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the United States, by the People’s Party in Denmark, by Conservatives against Labour in the United Kingdom, and by the Right in a host of other places.16
The main way that xenophobia can be overcome is through contact and cooperation between immigrants and natives, at work, in schools, in common projects. But it is precisely the fear, the stereotypes, on the part of natives, in addition to the gestures, and even measures, of exclusion they carry out, that can render this kind of transformative contact more and more difficult. There may be a point of virtual nonreturn on this path. Contemporary France appears to be approaching it.
This fear of the other, intensified in a moral register, can reach a virtual paroxysm in the nightmare fantasy that our ancestral culture may not survive, that we will be totally “replaced.”17
But there are also cases in which those relegated to second-class citizenship are not immigrants, or recent arrivals, but long-standing members of the society. They are victims of stranger, somewhat troubling notions of precedence. We see this in the United States, for instance. In a very interesting book entitled Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Hochschild describes the mentality. In the imaginary of certain “old-stock” populations, there is a kind of order of precedence: the natives (but, of course, these don’t include the Indigenous populations, who are conveniently forgotten) come first, the people who arrived later come second (as happens in many countries); but, in an even more damaging version, precedence also holds between groups who by any measure are long-standing residents, so that whites come first, and Blacks, Latinos / as, and so on come after. Or, in virtually all “settler” societies, Aboriginal peoples’ interests tend to have low priority, when they are not seen as total outsiders. These, rarely explicitly avowed, assumptions of precedence provide the basis for campaigns against “liberal” governments that are allegedly helping all these second-tier people at the expense of the first-tier people. That was a very powerful part of the Trump campaign. You get this slide from all Americans are equal, to some are more fully, really core Americans. The idea of precedence as a basis for greater entitlement becomes an exclusionary mechanism.18
Assumptions of precedence can cast light on phenomena such as the hostile reactions of many whites to Black Lives Matter campaigns. Across the United States and even globally there were inspiring reactions to the police murder of George Floyd. These show that these unstated hierarchical presumptions are not unchangeable. Arguably the pandemic encouraged recognition of some of the uglier and terribly dysfunctional side of our societies. But the inspiring wave of protests was relatively short-lived and there has been a partially successful right-wing campaign to demonize Black Lives Matter.
The slide to exclusion is a catastrophe for various reasons. It is a catastrophe because it deeply divides, hampers, and paralyzes democratic society, dividing us into first- and second-class citizens. It is also a catastrophe because it builds on the frustration caused by the first slide I discussed in the previous section, the Great Downgrade, as a result of which people feel that the system is stacked against them, that they can’t affect it, and that their efficacy as citizens is virtually nonexistent. They are ready for a program that would liberate the demos or give the demos power again, against the elites.
Only the demos has now been redescribed, either in a moralist, or ethnic, or historical-precedent way that is by definition exclusionary, and this redescription has the double disadvantages that it deeply divides the society and that it does not at all meet the actual problems and challenges of the Downgrade. It’s an open secret: Trump is not going to make America great again.
There is an element of quasi-magical thinking in the belief that real-world problems can be solved by blaming and scapegoating the allegedly undeserving minority from within. In fact, this kind of belief is part of the scapegoat mechanism—a continuing temptation for societies throughout the ages. We identify a group that is not really part of our society, whether it consists of external enemies or hidden internal foes, and see it as the cause of our misfortunes. This diagnosis is seductive, because it clears us, the true members of our society, of any responsibility for our misfortunes, and it offers what seems a simple remedy—namely, to expel, or cordon off, or neutralize the offending group.19 Following this “remedy” will certainly lead to failure, and worse.
Such exclusionary practices call into question the consoling thought that our slide away from the definitional telos of democracy—that the demos really have a say in government—might be compensated by a move toward another telos—building an egalitarian society without discrimination or exclusion, which is the defining goal of modern liberal democracy. It is clear that this kind of society is not viable without a strong sense of solidarity and mutual help. Equality of respect, once one can paint it as bought at the expense of widespread neglect of important segments of the population, cannot be sustained.
Now, a word about the term “populism.” There is more than one kind, with different political implications. Even in the 2016 election in the United States, the word was used to apply to two movements, represented by Bernie Sanders and by Donald Trump, respectively. One obvious meaning of the term applies when the “people,” in the sense of the demos or nonelites, are mobilized to erupt into a system that has been run without considering them; they are breaking down the walls, breaking down the doors, disturbing business as usual, demanding redress of grievance. But there is a very big difference between the Bernie and the Donald version: the Bernie version is truly inclusive; it’s not excluding anyone. One may not agree with the particular policies put forward; one may or may not be happy about this populist eruption. But Bernie Sanders’s program does not embrace the notion that precedence gives some citizens greater rights than others. This exclusionary feature is basic and, I think, absolutely fatal to the populist appeals of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders. It is both deeply divisive and in programmatic terms a dead-end.
But the “bad,” exclusionary populism also comes in a number of varieties today. The type I invoked above harnesses a justified sense of socioeconomic grievance to exclusionary feelings, or implicit understandings of precedence, which are widespread in the society. Trumpian Republicanism, Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, and to some extent also the Brexit movement in Britain exemplify this.
That “we” are being neglected is a manifestation of what I refer to as our lack of citizen efficacy. This is closely linked in certain societies to a lack of efficacy in a wider sense. Citizens in a modern democratic state aspire not only to be heard by government, but also to be able to take care of themselves and their dependents; to make a living, either in a paid job, or in some gainful activity on their own initiative. It is when circumstances beyond their control make it impossible for them to do so that they expect to be helped by government. And when governments fail to provide this help, while offering (what is seen as) lavish support to those who are less deserving, or have lower priority, or belong to groups considered as “outsiders,” that powerful anger at this perceived unfairness can be kindled. The sense of neglect will probably be less in societies that routinely offer various forms of support during such crises, which means societies with a more developed welfare state. Obviously, the outlier in this dimension in the Western world is the United States, and that has meant that the rise of “bad” populism in the United States has special features. Low levels of welfare provision have gone along with, and been conditioned by, a rather unrealistic ethic of self-reliance, which is often shared by the victims of neglect. People who have lost their jobs in rust belts often suffer the reproach that they haven’t tried hard enough—Why didn’t they move? Why didn’t they acquire another skill?—even when these expectations are unreasonable.20 Worse, this ethic is often at least half-shared by the targets of this criticism, which adds internal misery to external misfortune.21 No wonder this unbearable situation should find relief in a wave of resentment against the “undeserving” beneficiaries of state aid and the “liberal elites” who give them preference. And no wonder, too, that this psychological and social predicament should blind those who share it to the responsibility of the “conservative” forces whose false moralization has denied them much needed help.
But elsewhere in Europe, we find mobilizations of nativism that seem to owe very little to socioeconomic deprivation. Germany might seem to be a case in point. Apart from the special case of the eastern region, the ex–German Democratic Republic, the economy is in relatively good shape, and unemployment is about half the rate that it is in France. But a closer study shows that among voters who ally themselves with the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a great number find their wages slipping in relation to the cost of living and that local infrastructure and services, such as local shops and transport, are suffering cutbacks. Here, too, there is a decline in the smaller centers that I noted above; these voters also fear downward social mobility and an uncertain retirement income. Even people who have long worked and lived alongside “Gastarbeiter”—the foreign migrants who participated in a guest worker program in Germany—and don’t have fears for German culture, voted for the AfD out of a sense of relative neglect. When their needs are not being met by the political system, many ask, why so much attention and resources are showered on outsiders? In fact, the Af D started well before the current refugee crisis, in protest against the supposedly over-generous support the federal government wanted to accord the less fortunate EU economies that were victims of the 2008 crisis. (this ostensibly excessive German generosity was hardly perceptible in Greece, but this just underscores the narrow nationalism of the new party.)
The motif “Why them in preference to us?” is common to a great many “populist” movements.22 And in this sense it echoes the notions of precedence that energized the Trump campaign in the United States, except that in the German case it can sometimes be shorn of the half-latent assumptions of racial and civilizational superiority that one finds in the United States (and also elsewhere in the West).
The motives for exclusion in Germany like other European countries certainly include the fear that the culture might be changed, that the majority would be forced to be different if too many immigrants arrived. This is partially analogous to the Québécois fear of being changed against their will. But the parallel is not to Quebec case, with its background of a long battle for survival as a francophone society, in a largely anglophone context. There are more similarities to recent Québécois anxieties about non-Western immigrants that threaten the relative homogeneity of their society and the achievements of their battles for linguistic autonomy. European fears also arise in confrontation with non-Western immigrants, starting with Germany’s waves of Gastarbeiter, who began arriving in the 1960s. Hence the ominous invocations of German “Leitkultur” (leading culture) in the last decades. The geopolitical situation, the media saliency of jihadism, all have combined to create a situation where the temptation to exaggerate dangers and then to surf on them is just too strong for some politicians to resist. A clear example is how a massive refugee influx in 2015 led the Bavarian Christian Social Union to turn away from its traditional alliance with the Christian Democratic Union in anger at Angela Merkel’s attempt to organize a positive reception for the newcomers.
So cultural fear, the sense of civilizational superiority, and resentment at being unjustly neglected by government in favor of outsiders all play a role in the upsurge of European exclusionary movements. There is no sharp line between different types of movement, but rather a sliding scale from those in which socioeconomic deprivation plays a major role, through those in which it is a minor part of the movement’s appeal, to those in which it seems to play virtually no role at all and cultural fears and resentments dominate (for example, Austria, Denmark).
Despite what would seem to be antidemocratic tendencies, most European countries seem to have a firm intention to remain democracies and to seek to realize the definitional telos of giving the demos more serious say in government. They are all democracies in the on / off sense, by the “free and fair elections” criterion. Xenophobic parties would leave power if they lost an election. They retain the contingency feature, that there is no a priori limit to election results.
But the xenophobic movements in these European societies find themselves in collaboration with other ruling parties who govern societies that are no longer clearly democracies in this sense. Prominent examples are Hungary and Poland. There the consecrated national or “leading” culture has a quite distinct status. Its preeminence should never be challenged. So although many of the forms of democracy are present, the aim is to arrange things so that no government not dedicated to maintaining this culture’s predominance can gain power.
These are not just “illiberal democracies,” to use Viktor Orbán’s expression, in the sense that they allow themselves to discriminate against minorities and against those whose morals are not in conformity with the supposed national culture; they are also “rigged democracies,” because they are built with the intention of making an opposition takeover impossible.23 Such a regime already exists in Hungary under Fidesz, and another is (perhaps) in the process of being constructed in Poland under the PiS.24
Rigged democracies seem to have become a major feature of the contemporary scene. They could include Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Xenophobic movements often strike liberals in the West as regressions to the 1930s, when totalitarian governments of the Right took over a series of European countries. But the present wave of rigged democracies do not seem to aspire to return to the model of, say, Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. They are satisfied with something less, provided a real governmental overturn is ruled out.
Consequently, election results may make a serious difference—just not the crucial one of regime change. But the spectrum of opposition parties may change. Governments can even be defeated and changed, as occurred in Iran (in 1997, 2003, 2013, and 2017)—except that there, elections operate under the surveillance of the Guardian Council of Ayatollahs, who have the right and function of eliminating certain candidacies before the elections. Governments operate in the shadow of the irresponsible power of the Republican guards and armed forces, who pursue their own foreign and military policies, and do not have the ability to control the judicial system with its widespread abuses and use of torture. The central role of the Ayatollahs remains irremovable.
Good old-fashioned totalitarian rule seems mostly confined to East Asia: to China, North Korea, and the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Not that the Chinese model of “decisive action” may not attract followers in the coming decades, as Chinese economic and political influence expands. There are dictatorial regimes elsewhere, not least in Central Asia, but they have not—at least yet—institutionalized totalitarian rule for longer-term reproduction.
Contrary to our naive expectations in 1989, anti-democracies remain numerous and strong, with impressive recent recruits since 2010. Indeed, those who know twentieth-century history may have a sense of déjà vu in this respect: in face of the Great Depression of the 1930s many in Western societies had a sense of the powerlessness of representative democracies to master the crisis. Effective action seemed to be occurring only in dictatorships of the Left and the Right, in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy.25 The New Deal, as well as the aftermath of the Second World War and the victorious defeat of dictatorships, relegated this sense of powerlessness to an almost forgotten past. But in today’s political scene, it is possible to wonder whether the challenge of global warming requires a response more like China’s than those that our democratic regimes, especially that of the United States, are capable of developing.
Now we come to the third axis of democracy’s degeneration—the third great deviation from its telos—which is when it gets defined as “rule of the majority,” where both “majority” and “minority” are given fixed definitions beforehand, without reference to any particular moment or decision. That means that those relegated to the “minority” cease to have the same legitimacy as their opponents; they are not really or fully part of the society. We cease to consider the whole republic as a deliberative community, in the sense defined by Hannah Arendt, a community that has to work things out together, respecting each other’s opinions, listening to each other, finding some minimally divisive solution.26 On the contrary, a certain segment of the people is excluded from this mutual respectful exchange.
The normal operation of a deliberative community in the above sense leads inevitably to changes in the constitution of the winning majority over time, whether we define a given majority in terms of the citizens who voted for its program, or in terms of the interests, policy convictions, and identities that were strongly represented in it. In the normal course of things, people can revise their view of their interests, modify their convictions about policy, change their understanding of their identity. And on top of all this, the issues that are salient at the moment shift over time. In short, it is normal for new constellations to arise.
Different senses of the term “majority” are relevant here. There is the operative majority, the one that confers power—such as the majority of seats in a legislative assembly or the majority of electoral votes in an American presidential election. But this majority does not necessarily correspond to the majority of votes cast, and the views of that voting majority may in turn be different from the opinions of the majority of citizens. Even if this last remains the same, differences in turn out, vote distribution between parties, the presence or absence of gerrymandering and the like can bring about different operative majorities.
The desire to make a given majority coalition the permanent victor is necessarily a threat to the normal operation of a deliberative community. Although one can understand a given party or political leadership wishing for permanence, being ready to use all and every means to bring it about is a danger to democracy itself. It is one of the pathologies that democracy can fall prey to.
This pathology can arise only where differences go very deep and are very acutely felt. Of course, this sense of radical opposition has to go beyond the leadership, if the attempt to ensure permanent victory is to succeed. Thus, a leadership that has decided on this course has to do everything in its power to keep the original coalition together. It has to create the sense that the opposition is somehow illegitimate, that including some elements of them in a new winning constellation is somehow a betrayal of the national identity.
Here is where the language and appeal of xenophobic populism can become virtually irresistible. Opponents are read out of the people, denied inclusion in the legitimate deliberative community—which, necessarily, will no longer operate as a normal deliberative community when it consists of only the “real” people. In contrast, a temporary majority in a normal deliberative community will begin to encounter differences, as its members revise their views on identity, policy, interests, and their sense of what the crucial questions are; and this will lead to a loosening of the original constellation.
Such a loosening is what a leadership aiming for permanent victory has to combat at all costs. Its interest therefore lies in whipping up the original differences of identity and stoking the resentments, the sense of grievance, of being belittled and neglected, which brought the original coalition together.
This strategy allows for, may even seem to demand, an authoritarian form of rule, particularly if a leader can be found who is on the same wave-length as the continuing and homogenous majority, now named the (real) “people” and can be counted on to keep the original, unifying grievances alive. The strategy does not require—it even excludes—intermediary bodies who need to be consulted or who relay proposals to the top, where they wouldn’t otherwise reach.
And, above all, it has no room for what the French political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-powers” (contre-pouvoirs): these include various bodies that have to be consulted, but also courts that can invalidate decisions of the top authorities, be those decisions in the form of legislation or decree. And they also target media, another key constituent of “counter-powers,” insofar as they are critical of the leadership.27
To enter on this path of attempting to ensure irreversible victory is a fateful step. Even if at first it shuns the methods of xenophobic populism, its logic can prepare the path for a demagogic xenophobe, as mainstream Republicanism in the United States opened the way for Trump. We enter on a terrain that resembles a civil war without guns (at least for the moment; sometimes this kind of division will end up bringing the guns out, too).
Where one side tries to make its temporary victory permanent, the normal rules of courtesy and civility are suspended, as are all those informal rules that are meant to assure that the debate can go on. When one party goes on this path, the chances are very strong that the other will eventually be induced to answer in kind, and then the bloodless (we hope) civil war starts.
Developments in the United States illustrate this development in a stark and worrying fashion. Since 2012, Republicans have been engaged in attempts to render their hegemony permanent and have used more and more extreme means to assure this: voter suppression, gerrymandering, the refusal of a Republican Senate to act on Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, and other such actions.28 Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election in 2020 is an extreme case based partly on his personal ambitions. But it is also a continuation of the pattern set by the Republican Party.
What kinds of division motivate this range of extreme, destructive behavior? Certain narrow interests—for instance, those of the rich and powerful—can play a role (think of the death of the Weimar Republic). But to create a broad enough movement that will back such extremism, an issue that will rally masses of people must be at stake. Usually, the crucial dispute turns on rival definitions of what we may call political identity. And this is certainly what is happening in the contemporary United States.
The battle over what the United States stands for is worth examining in greater detail. It is complex and (for this foreigner) rather bewildering: in particular American “conservatism” seems to combine elements such as guns, the Gospel, and a weakness for Ayn Rand that to outsiders seem incompatible. But the American case is too important to ignore, and we will come back to discuss it later in this book, when we consider what can be done to resolve the current crisis.
But for the moment, we can note that similar deep divisions over political identity shape other “populist” movements that attack their opponents as traitors and enemies of the “people.” As noted already, examples range throughout Europe from Viktor Orbán Fidesz in Hungary to the French Rassemblement National and indeed throughout the world. In this kind of situation, the second and third degenerations—namely, the waves of exclusion and polarization—easily combine, and two segments of the population are declared to be outside the “people”: the rejected outsiders (for instance, immigrants, or Muslims), on the one hand, and the “elites” who are supposedly favoring them over the “real” members of the nation, on the other.
Decline of citizen efficacy, waves of exclusion, and polarization: these three axes of degeneration go together today. They don’t always go together, but they are occurring together now, and they mutually reinforce each other. Democracy is susceptible to each one. It’s susceptible to sliding toward elite rule, and it’s susceptible to various mechanisms that kick in and keep it spiraling downward. It’s susceptible to falsely moralistic or “nativist” redefinition—to use this perhaps too-simple generic term for various forms of ethnic-historical exclusion. And these redefinitions also have a certain self-feeding property, because the divisions and exclusions they start or exacerbate tend to intensify. The cleavages and barriers they erect make it very hard to get the whole people back together again.
The exclusionary polarization also easily lends itself to a redefinition of democracy as the irreversible hegemony of today’s winning party or tendency, “designated” by fiat as “majority rule” tout court.
The second two degenerations combine easily in the idea that there is one massive majority will and that it is being frustrated by the elite and the outsiders they are helping, and what democracy means is to establish this will, no discussion, no compromise, no respect. It’s just rammed through.
Of course, even “good” (that is, nonexclusive) “populism” can be carried to extremes, so that all opponents are excluded from the “people.” We saw this with Bolshevism, where those who stood in the way of the enforced remaking of Russian society—nobles, “kulaks,” “deviationists”—were declared enemies of the people and ruthlessly eliminated. Something of this ruthless drive exists today in Xi Jinping’s China, but this kind of politics has little attraction in today’s democracies.
The slide of democracy into permanent “majority” rule is a disaster for any society. It introduces a ruthlessness into political life. It divides and poisons the public sphere. It renders society much less capable of dealing with the big common challenges that affect both sides of the division equally, challenges such as global warming and the negative effects of globalization and automation.
And it is this identification of democracy and irreversible majority rule that has helped to kill (full) democracy off in various very fragile contexts—I am thinking of Russia, Hungary, and Turkey as examples. Their moves to the “rigged” category have been built on the idea of who the real Russians, Hungarians, and Turks are—what culture and religious orthodoxy is being defended against Western liberal values or homosexuality. In the case of Turkey, the rigged democracy has been built on “pious Islam” and rejecting any compromise with the Kurds, who are demonized as “terrorists.” This kind of move can actually destroy a functioning democracy. Even if these were not very stable democracies to begin with, you can still see where this kind of policy can lead.
And there are many democracies today that have not yet tipped over into the “rigged” category. Or where they have tipped, the result has not yet become institutionally stable. This is the case in Poland, where the struggle is still undecided. The “open” political identity, championed by Solidarnosc and John Paul II, rooted in the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpopolita), was reversed by a later, narrower, caricaturally integrist Catholicism, under the banner of the misleadingly named “Law and Justice” Party. But 2020 protests against such narrowing of political identity show the game is not over. The party packed courts, as has recently been a widespread tactic of the Right. A constitutional tribunal, composed mostly of recently appointed judges, moved to curtail abortion rights. But this provoked a massive women’s strike, which overlapped with broader antigovernment demonstrations.
Democracy is not what a majority at this moment or that happens to want. It is a project of greater empowerment and inclusion, liberty, equality, and solidarity for the future.
Our present parlous condition results from the combination of three serious paths of degeneration, which are, again, a decline of citizen efficacy, waves of exclusion, and polarization. We are unfortunate that they have occurred together. We could imagine worlds in which this destructive trio hadn’t arrived in tandem. But they are not altogether without connections. The Great Downgrade and the decline of felt citizen efficacy prepared a fertile ground for demagogic attempts to target “outsiders” and for the more and more outrageous politics of discrimination, which has polarized us to a point that our democratic regimes are in danger—and some are already over the edge.
We have to tackle this crisis at its roots: the Great Downgrade and the galloping inequality and sense of citizen powerlessness which it engenders. And that means that we urgently need to create a new solidarity, across the divides that today paralyze us, and render us unable to address the challenges we face, and to define and carry through policies directed to the common good. We have to build the organizations and alliances that will do for us what social democracy did in the aftermath of the Second World War, laying the groundwork for the boom that is remembered today in France as les trente glorieuses. We can make comparable strides forward today.