The available analyses of Democratic Fatigue Syndrome could be seen as falling into four diagnostic categories: it’s the fault of politicians, it’s the fault of democracy, it’s the fault of representative democracy and – one specific variant – it’s the fault of electoral-representative democracy. I’ll look at them in that order.
It’s the fault of politicians: The diagnosis of populism
That politicians are careerists, money-grabbers and parasites, that they’re profiteers, that they’re out of touch with the common man and that we’d be better off without them. The slogans are familiar enough and populists make use of them daily. According to their diagnosis, the crisis of democracy is first of all a crisis of political personnel and our current rulers form a democratic elite, a caste completely divorced from the needs and grievances of the average citizen. No wonder democracy is in trouble!
It’s a discourse that in Europe is verbalised by seasoned leaders such as Silvio Berlusconi, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, but also by relative newcomers such as Beppe Grillo in Italy, Norbert Hofer in Austria, and parties such as Jobbik (Hungary), the Finns Party (previously known as the True Finns) and Golden Dawn (Greece). In the English-speaking world we have seen the spectacular rise of figures like Nigel Farage and, of course, Donald Trump. According to them the remedy for Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is relatively simple: better representation of the populace, or rather more popular representation of the populace, preferably in the form of a larger vote for their own populist parties. The leaders promote themselves as direct representatives of the people, as the voice of the underbelly, the embodiment of common sense. They claim that unlike their colleagues they are close to the man or woman in the street, that they say what they think and do what needs to be done, and that the populist politician is at one with the people.
That all this is questionable in the extreme we know well enough, because there’s no such thing as one monolithic ‘people’ (every society has its diversity), nor is there anything that could be described as a ‘national gut feeling’, and common sense is the most ideological thing imaginable. After all, ‘common sense’ is an ideology that refuses to recognise its own ideological character, like a zoo that sincerely believes it is an example of unspoilt nature. The notion that someone can be at one with the masses in some organic way, at one with their values and unfailingly conscious of their fickle yearnings, is a belief that tends more towards mysticism than politics: no deep current exists, only marketing.
Populists are political entrepreneurs trying to gain as large a market share as they can, if need be by deploying a little romantic kitsch. It is unclear how, once they have gained power, they intend to deal with those who think differently, since democracy gives power to the majority while retaining respect for the minority – otherwise it degenerates into a dictatorship of the majority that will make us even worse off.
Deploying populism as a solution to the sickness of democracy is therefore not a promising path to take. But that the remedy doesn’t work is not to say it cannot possibly offer some valuable assistance.25 Populists are right, in that those who today maintain they represent the people do indeed have a problem with legitimacy. The number of highly educated people in our parliaments is so out of proportion that we would be right to speak of a ‘diploma democracy’.26 Moreover, there is a recruitment problem. Representatives were once chosen ‘because they meant something in society’, as sociologist J.A.A. van Doorn put it. Now, even among populists, we see more and more ‘professional politicians, often young people with more ambition than experience. They are going to mean something because they’ve been elected.’27 No less problematic is the tendency to regard the role of being a Member of Parliament as an interesting career, a full-time job sometimes passed on from father to son, rather than a temporary service lasting just a few years and performed for the sake of society. In Flanders several democratic dynasties have emerged and we are already into the second generation of the families De Croo, De Gucht, De Clercq, Van den Bossche and Tobback. Brand awareness speeds the journey to Parliament, ‘while some wouldn’t even have made it onto the local council with another name’, as a former top politician once told me, off the record.
Simply dismissing populism as a form of anti-politics seems to me intellectually dishonest. At its best populism is an attempt to tackle the crisis of democracy by increasing the legitimacy of representation. Populists want to combat Democratic Fatigue Syndrome by means of one simple but drastic intervention; fresh blood in Parliament, a blood transfusion, as complete as possible, and the rest will take care of itself. Opponents wonder whether this will do anything to increase efficiency and doubt if government will improve because a few new people have been taken on board. To them the problem is not the people who staff our democracy but democracy itself.
It’s the fault of democracy: The diagnosis of the technocracy
Democratic decision-making which has become slow and long-winded undermines belief in the democratic process, and faced with the huge and urgent challenges of, for example, the euro crisis, the search is on for a more efficient system. An obvious solution would appear to be technocracy, a system where experts are charged with looking after the public interest, people whose technical know-how will pilot the country through today’s troubled waters. Technocrats are managers who replace politicians, so they don’t need to worry about elections but can concentrate on long-term solutions and announce unpopular measures. In their hands policy becomes a matter of civic engineering, of problem-management.
It’s often thought that those who advocate technocracy are the concerned elite who want to see progress. But is it really a question of populism for the people, technocracy for the elite? In fact research in the US has shown that ordinary people have a fairly casual attitude to the prospect of giving power to unelected experts or entrepreneurs: ‘People would rather thrust power at someone who does not want it than someone who does,’ note the authors of the influential Stealth Democracy. Most citizens want democracy to be like a Stealth bomber: invisible and efficient. ‘Successful business people and independent experts, though not necessarily empathetic, are perceived to be competent, capable individuals not in pursuit of power. That is enough for many people, or at least it is better than the kind of representation they believe they are receiving now.’28
The argument for technocracy builds to an important degree on the ‘post-political’ thinking of the 1990s. In that era of the Third Way in politics, of the Neue Mitte and la cohabitation, there was a belief that ideological differences were a thing of the past. After decades of conflict, left and right suddenly walked arm in arm. The solutions were there, people said, they only had to be implemented and it was simply a matter of ‘good governance’. Ideological struggle gave way to the TINA (‘there is no alternative’) principle, and the foundations for a technocratisation of politics had been laid.
The most striking recent examples of such a turn towards technocracy are to be found in countries like Greece and Italy, where in recent years unelected leaders have been allowed to head government teams. Loukas Papadimos was in power from 11 November 2011 to 17 May 2012, Mario Monti from 16 November 2011 to 21 December 2012. Their financial and economic expertise (one as a banker, the other as an economics professor) were seen as trump cards when the crisis was at its worst.
But technocracy comes about in countless other less visible places. In recent years a huge amount of power has moved from national parliaments to transnational institutions such as the European Central Bank, the European Commission, the World Bank and the IMF. Because these are not democratically elected, they represent a far-reaching technocratisation of decision making: bankers, economists and monetary analysts have got their hands on the levers of power.
This is not just about foreign organisations. Every modern nation state has given itself a technocratic slant by removing competences from the democratic arena and depositing them elsewhere. The power of central banks and constitutional courts, for example, has grown markedly. It seems governments have thought it sensible to take crucial tasks such as monetary supervision and constitutional reform out of the clutches of party politics and the electoral calculus that goes with it.
Is this a bad thing? There is no doubt that a technocratic government can achieve great results, the Chinese economic miracle being the best example, while a leader like Mario Monti was a far better manager of public affairs than Silvio Berlusconi could ever be. But efficiency does not automatically generate legitimacy and faith in the technocrat melts away as soon as spending cuts are implemented. In the presidential elections of February 2013, Monti won only 10% of the vote. China has its own ways of suppressing dissatisfaction with government-by-regents.
There is little point in regarding technocracy as taboo, if only because new states often start out with a technocratic phase, as for example the Fifth Republic of Charles de Gaulle in 1958 or Kosovo in 2008. A state does not always emerge by democratically legitimate means and after a revolution power is always in the hands of an unelected elite for a transitional phase. The trick then is to organise elections or a referendum as quickly as possible, so that the trust-gauge can start rising and legitimacy can be created a posteriori. In the short term a technocracy can give fresh impetus, in the long term it is not a viable form of government. Democracy is not just government for the people but government by the people.
Technocrats work in precisely the opposite way to populists. They try to relieve Democratic Fatigue Syndrome by giving efficiency priority over legitimacy in the hope that good results will eventually win the approval of those they govern, in other words, in the hope that efficiency will spontaneously generate legitimacy. That may happen certainly, but politics is more than simply a matter of good government. Sooner or later, moral choices have to be made, choices which require consultation with society. But where can such a consultation take place? ‘In Parliament’ is the standard answer, but it is an answer which many are beginning to question and which brings us directly to a third diagnosis.
It’s the fault of representative democracy: The diagnosis of direct democracy
On 2 August 2011, twelve people sat in a circle in Bowling Green Park in New York City.29 That day was the high point of one of the most astonishing episodes in recent American history. Over the preceding weeks and months Democrats and Republicans had been unable to agree about raising the American debt ceiling.30 The Democrats wanted the government to borrow more on international money markets to ensure the nation kept working, whereas the Republicans would agree to that only if President Obama also made a huge saving by reducing federal expenditure on those most in need of care. The Republicans, stirred up by the Tea Party, dug in their heels saying: cuts first, and only after that our fiat. The Democrats, who thought minimal taxation for the richest fairer than draconian cuts for the poorest, refused to bow to Republican blackmail. In any case the vast American national debt had been created by the Republicans, with their senseless military intervention in Iraq.
The debate reached total deadlock and the day was rapidly approaching on which, according to calculations, the American government would no longer be able to pay its bills and salaries: 2 August 2011. It was rather like a tactical standstill in cycling, when the leading riders balance almost at a halt just before the finish – if neither side makes a move, they’ll soon be overtaken by the peloton. A huge economic recession would overtake the US, and there was even the threat of a worldwide crisis, since if the treasury of the largest economy on the planet were to run out of money, the rest of the world would be dragged down with it. It got to the point where even technocratic China asked democratic America not to go too far as party interests were all well and good, but there was such a thing as statesmanship. In the end the Democrats were forced to back down and the Republicans emerged victorious. It was as if the 2012 presidential campaign was already well under way.
The twelve in Bowling Green Park were totally fed up with the course of events. The insane tug of war between two parties had come within a hair’s breadth of casting the entire world economy into a crisis. Was Congress still the environment in which representatives of the people served the public interest, or were the House of Representatives and the Senate more a playground for two parties playing childish games of increasingly reckless speculation? One of those present was a Greek artist who lived in New York.31 She proposed not merely protesting but using a method she had seen in Athens, that of a ‘general assembly’ in a public space which random passers-by could join, and be given a chance to speak. Points of view were expressed on both sides and the entire group sought a consensus. That experience of egalitarian, direct democracy, as an alternative to the wrangling of representative democracy, proved infectious. The meeting in Bowling Green became bigger and bigger in the months that followed, and Occupy Wall Street was born.
The reference to Wall Street and the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ suggest that the movement was all about the economy, but in reality dissatisfaction with representative democracy lay at the root of the protest.32 One of the participants put it like this:
In Congress, there is a claim that there is the united goal of serving the American people, but in reality there is a power war between political parties. Also, our elected representatives are not reflecting the perspectives of all their constituents. They are only representing the perspectives of those in their preferred political party and the monied elite who fill their campaign coffers – in reverse priority of course. This gets to the core complaint of the 99%. Our representatives aren’t representing us.33
The Occupiers who camped out for weeks in Zuccotti Park in the autumn of 2011 took their inspiration from demonstrators on Tahrir Square in Cairo and the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. A general assembly was held twice a day, a kind of parliament outside Parliament, a political forum without political parties, where citizens could put forward any proposals and discuss them without having to go through elected representatives. The general assembly lay at the heart of the movement and it quickly developed its own arsenal of rituals, most striking among them the ‘people’s mic’. Because amplification was banned, everything was acoustic, without technical aids, even at meetings with many hundreds of participants. A person would speak and the people around would repeat what they said until the message reached those right at the back in a series of waves. To express agreement or disagreement or to ask for further elucidation, various hand signals were invented. The meetings had no chair, no leaders of factions, no spokespeople, at most a few moderators to keep the process on track. Horizontality was the name of the game.34
It led to the emergence on 23 September of the ‘Principles of Solidarity’, the movement’s first official document. Principle number one was not about casino capitalism, globalisation, bonus culture or the banking crisis, but about democracy. As a response to a sense of political disenfranchisement, the item that headed the list was ‘Engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy’.35
Elsewhere in the Western world, people took to the streets in search of a better democracy. In Spain the Indignados grew into a major movement with ‘Real Democracy Now’ as its slogan. On Syntagma Square in Athens tens of thousands of Greeks shouted slogans in favour of true democracy at the doors to the parliament building. The Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, the London Stock Exchange and the European Central Bank in Frankfurt found people camping outside their doors. In Germany there were the Wutbürger, angry citizens protesting against the new station in Stuttgart, night flights over Frankfurt, a third runway at Munich and the transport of nuclear waste by rail; ‘Wutbürger’ was chosen as word of the year in 2010. In Belgium I was one of those present at the start of the G1000, which campaigned for more citizen involvement in political decision-making. In cyberspace we all watched the rise of Anonymous and the Pirate parties.
In December 2011 Time magazine chose the protestor as its personality of the year and shortly after that the London School of Economics devoted a broad international study to the sudden rise of all this subterranean politics in Europe. The results are of great significance:
The most important finding that emerges from our project is that what is shared across different types of protests, actions, campaigns and initiatives is extensive frustration with formal politics as it is currently practiced. The terms ‘angry’, ‘indignant’ or ‘disappointed’ are an expression of this frustration . . . German society is far less affected by austerity measures than other European societies . . . Yet, despite the relatively positive situation in Germany, there is a striking public display of subterranean politics in Germany just as in other European contexts. This is because current protests are not so much simply about austerity but about politics.36
It is clear that many of those protestors consider Democratic Fatigue Syndrome the result of our current representative democracy, with its decaying structures and rituals. They agree with the technocrats that contemporary democracy has many faults, but they don’t want to replace it with something else, as the technocrats advocate: they want to improve it. How? Certainly they do not believe that injecting new people into parliament, as the populists suggest, is a solution. A blood transfusion is not a guaranteed cure for a body that is at death’s door. Moreover, they are not as enamoured of the cult of the leader as are the populists: it’s far too vertical for them, and it remains a form of delegation. What, then? The efficiency of the technocrats doesn’t appeal to them either. Their own peculiar, roundabout way of conducting meetings shows that they regard legitimacy as a good deal more important than rapid results.
If you take a close look at Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados, what is striking is the movement’s strong anti-parliamentarianism. ‘Our representatives aren’t representing us,’ they said in New York while in Madrid it was put like this:
In Spain most of the political class doesn’t even listen to us. Politicians ought to hear our voice and make political participation by citizens possible by a direct route, so that society as a whole is involved, instead of thriving at our expense and focusing all their attention on the dictatorship of big economic powers.37
Occupiers and Indignados feed on adjectives: new democracy, deep democracy, horizontal, direct, participative, consensus-driven democracy. In short they hunger for true democracy and believe that parliaments and parties have had their day. They set consensus against conflict, consultation against voting, respectful listening against theatrical quarrels. They refuse to have leaders, make no concrete demands and distrust the outstretched hand of existing movements. When the Indignados marched through the streets of Brussels, flags of political parties and even trade unions were unwelcome. Those were all considered to be part of the system.
The last time we saw such vehement anti-parliamentarianism in Europe was between the wars. Because the First World War and the crisis of the 1920s were commonly seen as the outcome of nineteenth-century bourgeois democracy, three leaders inveighed bitterly against the parliamentary system: Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler. Nowadays it is often forgotten, but fascism and communism were originally attempts to make democracy more vital, based on the idea that if parliament was abolished, the people and their leader would be better able to converge (fascism) or the people could govern directly (communism). Fascism quickly degenerated into totalitarianism, but for quite some time communism continued to seek new forms of collective consultation. It is worth dusting off Lenin for a moment. In his famous State and Revolution of 1917, he advocated dispensing with parliamentarianism, noting that ‘Parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the “common people”’. He conveyed Marx’s view of the process of holding elections in a sentence that would not have been out of place in New York or Madrid: ‘The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in Parliament.’ For the development of his alternative he took inspiration from the Paris Commune of 1871 (the source of the word ‘communism’):
The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion does not degenerate into deception . . . Representative institutions remain, but there is no parliamentarism here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies.38
That some supporters of the Occupy movement compare the occupiers of Zuccotti Park with the Paris Commune is a relatively minor fault; pathos can overcome the best of us.39 But that a movement which lashed out so fiercely against the parliamentary system had no knowledge of history and had given no thought to viable alternatives was not just a strategic weakness, it was downright foolhardy. Was it truly aiming at a complete defeat of the existing model, and if so how were we to see the future? What guarantees were there of equality and freedom? How could we avoid making disastrous mistakes? It’s really not enough to be likeable and unconventional if you’re going to tinker with something as crucial as the consultative model. The great French philosopher of democracy Pierre Rosanvallon was right to warn that ‘When efforts are undertaken to make democracy stronger, it can turn against itself and become totalitarian, as happened in the Soviet Union’.40
When Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek spoke to the Occupiers in New York, he asked them not to fall in love with themselves, but unfortunately that is exactly what happened. In a damning essay, American journalist Thomas Frank describes how the movement became devoted to the cult of participation, of ‘direct democracy’, and how the means became an end in itself:
Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but it’s also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a sub-treasury system, like the Populists did. It didn’t lead a strike (a real one, that is) or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment centre, or a takeover of the dean’s office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison. With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. ‘The process is the message,’ as the protesters used to say.41
Dutch sociologist Willem Schinkel adds: ‘Occupy is in a sense the simulation of ideological resistance. The desire for a counter-ideology is central to it, far more so than any actual counter-ideology.’42
Occupy demonstrates the malaise more than it suggests any remedy. Its diagnosis of representative democracy was correct, but the alternative was weak. For participants in the general assemblies it will undoubtedly have been a moving and enjoyable experience, as the sense of being part of a community that discusses things in a calm and adult manner can be extraordinarily intense. There can never be too much cultivation of civic virtues, especially when parliament and the media no longer set a good example. But how that process might be extrapolated to echelons that can truly make a difference was unfortunately never explored. Stéphane Hessel, the French diplomat and former resistance hero whose pamphlet Indignez-vous gave a name to the Indignados, stressed repeatedly that indignation without engagement is not enough and that real attempts to influence governments are needed: ‘We must not become engaged at the margins but at the heart of power.’43
*
Each of the three remedies I have discussed so far appears to be dangerous, in that populism endangers the minority, technocracy endangers the majority and anti-parliamentarianism endangers freedom.
But in Europe in recent years a number of other movements have emerged that are not satisfied with symbolic protest at the margins. They have truly sought to reach ‘the heart of power’ and their members might be dubbed ‘neo-parliamentarians’. The Pirate Party, which emerged in Sweden in 2006 and which in Germany, virtually at least, was briefly the third largest party, is one of them. In the Netherlands the G500 tried by artful means to break into the main political parties and the Dutch Parliament. And Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement grew to become the third largest party in Italy.44
What is striking about these neo-parliamentarian movements is that they aimed to strengthen representative democracy by adding new forms of consultation. The Pirate Party evolved from a platform for digital rights into a political movement that wanted to enrich democracy with direct democracy.45 With the G500 more than five hundred young Dutch people suddenly became members of the three large parties of the centre so that they could influence their party manifestos. Later they invited voters to give more weight to their votes through the Stembreker (vote-breaker) by grouping their votes strategically. Here too the aim was to increase consultation, both within parties and in the formation of governing coalitions. Despite its leader’s populist rhetoric, the Five Star Movement aimed to improve the representation of the people by imposing new rules: no representatives with criminal records, no seats for life, no election of the same person for more than two terms. This was intended to open the door to allow more participation in politics by ordinary citizens.
Another striking aspect of these three initiatives is that after a rapid start and an avalanche of media attention, the enthusiasm of the public and the media quickly ebbed away and what at first seemed vivacious and new was put out with the trash after just a few months. Being elected to parliament does not give you authority as far as the media are concerned. You have four years to grow into the job of representing the people, but from the first day after the election you need to score immediately on the radio, preferably with wisecracks and familiarity with all that has gone before, as if you’ve never done anything else in your life. Amateurism is great, as long as it’s not amateurish. Even before you’ve been able to reveal your plans you’re written off; talents and ideals quickly burn out as a result. The new movements are certainly admirable for not turning their backs on parliament, but in today’s society, where perception is everything, winning an election is by no means enough.
Yes, Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is caused by the weakness of representative democracy, but neither antiparliamentarianism nor neo-parliamentarianism will turn the tide, as neither has properly investigated the notion of representation. One rejects it, the other still believes in it, but both unquestioningly assume that the representation of the people in a formal consultative organ is inextricably bound up with elections. We need to take a closer look at that assumption.
It’s the fault of electoral-representative democracy: A new diagnosis
In recent years, countless suggestions have been made with regard to strengthening representative democracy and reinstating its old glory, and they mostly take the form of new rules. An example would be that those who fulfil a political function must not combine their public office with their private sector work, or they must declare their income and wealth, or political parties must be financially transparent and comply with stricter requirements before they can receive government subsidies, or they must make their archives accessible to all, and so on. Or, finally, new rules for elections have been suggested, stating that national, regional and European elections must fall on the same day so that a quiet period can follow, constituencies be redrawn, methods of counting votes rethought and electoral rolls expanded. Shouldn’t parents be able to vote on behalf of their children, for example, so that they can indicate their long-term preferences? Shouldn’t it be possible to vote for several parties at the same time, so that the ‘particracy’ is reduced? Shouldn’t votes for ideas (referendums) be given a permanent place alongside votes for people?
All these proposals are helpful, some perhaps necessary, but even if they were all fully implemented, the problem would not be entirely solved, because Democratic Fatigue Syndrome is caused not by representative democracy as such but by a specific variant of it: electoral-representative democracy, the democracy that produces a body of representatives through elections. This requires further elucidation.
The words ‘elections’ and ‘democracy’ are nowadays synonymous for almost everyone. We have become convinced that the only way to choose a representative is through the ballot box. After all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states as much: ‘The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.’ That ‘shall be expressed’ is symptomatic of our way of looking at the issue: to say democracy is to say elections. But is it not remarkable that such a general document – the most universal legal document in human history – defines so precisely how the will of the people must be expressed? Is it not bizarre that a concise text about basic rights (fewer than two thousand words in total) pays attention to the practical execution of one of them, as if legislation about public health were to include a recipe? It’s as if the people who compiled the declaration in 1948 had come to see the specific method as a basic right, as if the procedure was in itself sacred.
It would appear that the fundamental cause of Democratic Fatigue Syndrome lies in the fact that we have all become electoral fundamentalists, despising those elected but venerating elections. Electoral fundamentalism is an unshakeable belief in the idea that democracy is inconceivable without elections and elections are a necessary and fundamental precondition when speaking of democracy. Electoral fundamentalists refuse to regard elections as a means of taking part in democracy, seeing them instead as an end in themselves, as a holy doctrine with an intrinsic, inalienable value.
This blind faith in the ballot box as the ultimate base on which popular sovereignty rests is seen most vividly of all in international diplomacy.46 When Western donor countries hope that countries ravaged by conflict, like Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan or East Timor, will become democracies, what they really mean is this: they must hold elections, preferably on the Western model, with voting booths, ballot papers and ballot boxes, with parties, campaigns and coalitions, with lists of candidates, polling stations and sealing wax, just like we do, only over there, and then they will receive money from us. Local democratic and proto-democratic institutions (village meetings, traditional conflict mediation or ancient jurisprudence) stand no chance. These things may have their value in encouraging a peaceful and collective discussion, but the money will be shut off unless our own tried and tested recipe is adhered to – rather in the way that traditional medicine must back off as soon as Western medicine turns up.
If you look at the recommendations of Western donors, it’s as if democracy is a kind of export product, off the peg, in handy packaging, ready for dispatch. Democracy becomes an Ikea kit for ‘free and fair elections’, to be put together by the recipient, with or without the help of the instructions enclosed.
And if the resulting piece of furniture is lopsided, uncomfortable to sit on or falls apart? Then it’s the fault of the customer, not the distant producer.
That elections can have all kinds of outcomes in states which are fragile, including violence, ethnic tensions, criminality and corruption, seems of secondary importance, and that elections do not automatically foster democracy but may instead prevent or destroy it is conveniently forgotten. We insist that in every country in the world people must traipse off to the polling stations, no matter how much collateral damage may result. Our electoral fundamentalism really does take the form of a new, global evangelism. Elections are the sacraments of that new faith, a ritual regarded as a vital necessity in which the form is more important than the content.
*
This focus on elections is actually rather odd. For almost three thousand years people have been experimenting with democracy and only in the last two hundred have they practised it exclusively by holding elections. Yet we regard elections as the only valid method. Why? Force of habit is at play here, of course, but there is a more fundamental cause, based on the fact that no one can deny that elections have worked pretty well over the past two centuries. Despite a number of notoriously bad outcomes, they’ve very often made democracy possible and they’ve brought order to the laborious quest for a credible balance between the contrasting demands of efficiency and legitimacy.
However, what is often forgotten is that elections originated in a completely different context from that in which they have to function today. Fundamentalists generally have little historical insight, assuming their own dogmas always held good, and electoral fundamentalists therefore have a poor knowledge of the history of democracy. This is orthodoxy without retrospection. In fact we badly need to take a look back.
When the supporters of the American and French revolutions proposed elections as a way of getting to know ‘the will of the people’, there were as yet no political parties, no laws regarding universal franchise, no commercial mass media, let alone social media. In fact the inventors of electoral-representative democracy had no idea that any of these things would come into existence. Figure 1 shows how much the political landscape has evolved since then.
There was a time when Europe had no citizens, only subjects. From the Middle Ages until well into the eighteenth century – here we are painting with a broad brush – power lay with a sovereign ruler, excepting the Dutch, Florentine and Venetian republics, which we will leave aside for now. In his palace, fort or castle, the ruler, perhaps with the help of a few nobles or councillors, took decisions about the affairs of his country. His decisions were conveyed to the market square by a messenger, who announced them to anyone willing to listen. The relationship between power and the masses was a oneway street, and this remained the case from feudalism to absolutism.
But over the course of the centuries a ‘public sphere’ emerged, to borrow a phrase and a theory from German sociologist Jürgen Habermas. Subjects resisted the top-down approach and gathered in public to discuss affairs of state. In the eighteenth century, the century of enlightened despotism, events gathered momentum. Habermas has described how places developed where people could discuss public matters. In Central European coffee houses, at German Tischgemeinschaften, in French restaurants and British pubs, the affairs of the day were debated. The public sphere took shape in new institutions such as cafés, theatres, opera houses, but perhaps most of all in that peculiar invention of the time, the newspaper. The political awareness that emerged during the Renaissance came to characterise larger and larger groups. The citizen was born.
FIGURE 1: Elections in historical perspective: the main developments in the electoral-representative system in Western democracies
The American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represent the high point of this development. A rebellious citizenry threw off the yoke of the British and French crowns and decided that the people were sovereign, not the king. To give the people a voice (or at least the bourgeois segment of the population, since the franchise was still very limited), a formal procedure was invented, the election, a procedure until then mainly used to choose a new pope.47 Voting was familiar as a means of achieving unanimity among a group of likeminded people, such as cardinals, but in politics it would now have to promote consensus between people seen as virtuous within their own circles. For a citizen of the early twenty-first century it takes a certain amount of imagination to conceive of a time when elections were not there to produce arguments but to promote unity. The public space par excellence – the place where individuals could speak in complete freedom for the sake of all – was called the parliament. Edmund Burke said of it: ‘Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.’48 Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom Burke disagreed on countless matters, was of the same opinion: ‘In proportion to the degree of concord which reigns in the assemblies, that is, the nearer opinion approaches unanimity, the more the general will predominates; while tumults, dissensions, and long debates declare the ascendancy of private interests and the declining situation of the State.’49 Parliamentarianism was the late-eighteenth-century citizenry’s answer to the absolutism of the ancien régime. It stood for a form of indirect, representative democracy. The enfranchised ‘people’ (meaning the bourgeois elite) chose its representatives and those representatives promoted the public interest in parliament. Elections, representation of the people and press freedom went hand in hand.
Over the next two centuries, this eighteenth-century method went through five structural transformations; political parties arose, universal suffrage was introduced, organised civil society grew, commercial media drowned out the public arena and social media added their voices to the clamour. It goes without saying that the external economic context is of great relevance too, as in times of crisis enthusiasm for democracy ebbs away (in our own time between the wars) whereas in times of prosperity the tide rises again.
Political parties emerged only after 1850. Of course there were already fault lines in the young democracies, such as between city-dwellers and provincials, between the money-rich and the land-rich, between Liberals and Catholics or between federalists and anti-federalists. But only towards the end of the nineteenth century did these groups evolve into clearly defined, formal groupings. There were still no mass parties, only executive parties with a modest number of members and the ambition to govern, but this soon changed, and although most constitutions do not mention them at all, they quickly became the most important players on the political pitch. Socialist parties, for example, became the greatest advocates of universal suffrage. Its introduction (in 1917 in the case of Belgium and the Netherlands, in 1918 in the United Kingdom, although in each case only for men) represented a structural transformation of the electoral system. Elections became a battle between different interest groups in society, each trying to gain the support of as large a segment of the electorate as possible. Elections, originally intended to promote unanimity, now became arenas for candidates who fought each other fiercely. The clash of the parties had begun.
After the First World War, love of electoral democracy cooled markedly. The economic crisis of the 1920s and 1930s fragmented support and anti-parliamentary, totalitarian models gained in popularity all over Europe. No one could have suspected that after the worldwide conflagration of 1940–45, democracy would flourish again, but the after-effects of the war and the enormous growth in prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s made many people in the West receptive to a reintroduction of the parliamentary system.
In the post-war years large mass parties dominated, and they held the structures of the state in their hands. Through a network of intermediary organisations (unions, corporations, state-controlled health services, even school networks and their own party media) they succeeded in being close to the lives of individual citizens. The public sphere was largely in the hands of this organised civil society. Governments owned the biggest and newest mass media (radio and television), but parties were able to participate through directorships, broadcasting slots or their own broadcasting organisations. All this resulted in an extremely stable system with great party loyalty and predictable voting behaviour.
The equilibrium came to an end as a result of neo-liberal thinking, which reshaped public space radically in the 1980s and 1990s. Not civil society but the free market was now the main architect and this applied to countless domains of public life, especially the media. Party newspapers disappeared or were bought up by media concerns, commercial broadcasters entered the field and even public broadcasters increasingly adopted market thinking. There was a true explosion of media. Viewing, reading and listening figures became hugely important; they were the daily share price index of public opinion. Commercial mass media emerged as the most important builders of social consensus and organised civil society lost ground, whether because unions and state health services adopted a market model or because governments preferred to talk to citizens directly rather than via social partners. The consequences were predictable, as citizens became consumers and elections hazardous. Parties, especially when they were financed largely by governments (often to limit the risk of corruption) saw themselves less and less as intermediaries between the masses and power and instead settled into the fringes of the state apparatus. To retain their places there they had to turn to the voter every few years to top up their legitimacy and elections became a battle fought out in the media for the favour of voters. The passions aroused among the populace diverted attention from a far more fundamental emotion, an increasing irritation with anything and everything pertaining to politics. ‘It would be hard to find someone who wasn’t cynical about the nature of these media-corporate spectacles that are presented to us as elections,’ said American theoretician Michael Hardt a couple of years ago.50 ‘Elections are just a beauty contest for ugly people,’ was the sarcastic comment doing the rounds on the internet.
In 2004 British sociologist Colin Crouch came up with the term ‘post-democracy’, to describe the new order controlled by the mass media:
Under this model, while elections certainly exist and can change governments, public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams. The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them. Behind the spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests.51
The Italy of Berlusconi undoubtedly comes closest to fitting the definition of the post-democratic state but elsewhere too we have seen processes that tend in that direction. Since the end of the twentieth century, citizens have started looking like their nineteenth-century predecessors. Because civil society has become weaker, a gulf has opened up again between the state and the individual. The channelling institutions have gone. Who now bundles the multiplicity of individual preferences? Who now translates grass-roots complaints into policy proposals at the top? Who now distils the tumult into clear ideas? There is pejorative talk of ‘individualism’, as if it’s the fault of the citizen that collective structures have fallen away, while in essence this is all about the fact that the people have become the masses again, the choir a cacophony.
It’s not over yet. After the rise of the political parties, the introduction of universal suffrage, the rise and fall of organised civil society and the coup by commercial media, another factor was added at the start of the twenty-first century: social media. The word ‘social’ is rather misleading, since Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr and Pinterest are as much commercial media as CNN, FOX or Euronews, with the difference that the owners don’t want you to watch and listen but to write and share. Their main aim is to keep you on the site for as long as possible, since that’s good for the advertisers. This explains the importance attached to ‘friends’ or ‘followers’, the addictive dynamics of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’, the continual stream of reports on what others are doing, whom you ought to get to know and which topics are trending.
But although social media are commercial media, they have a dynamism very much their own. At the beginning of the twenty-first century citizens could follow the political theatre minute by minute on radio, television or the internet but today they can respond to it from second to second and mobilise others. The culture of immediate reporting now has instant feedback resulting in even more of a cacophony. The work of the public figure, and especially the elected politician, is not made easier by any of this. He or she can immediately see whether new proposals appeal to the citizen, and indeed just how many people the citizen can whip up. New technology gives people a voice (allowing Mubarak and Ben Ali to join the conversation), but this new political involvement only makes the electoral system creak at the seams all the more.
Commercial and social media also reinforce one another; continually picking up each other’s news and bouncing it back, they create an atmosphere of perpetual mud-slinging. Tough competition, loss of advertising revenue and falling sales prompt the remaining commercial media to produce increasingly vehement reports about increasingly exaggerated conflicts, while their editorial boards become smaller, younger and cheaper. For radio and television, national politics has become a daily soap, a radio play with free actors, and while editors determine to some extent the framing, the script and the typecasting, politicians, with varying degrees of success, try to slant things this way or that. The most popular politicians are those who succeed in altering the script and reframing the debate, in other words bend the media to their will. There is space for some improvisation, which is then called topicality.
In the written press the entanglement is even more profound. Newspapers are losing readers and political parties are losing members. The old players of democracy are bobbing about amid the wreckage, clinging to each other, not realising that by doing so they are only dragging each other further down. Tied as it is to formats, circulation figures, shareholders and obligatory hotheadedness, the free press is far less free than it thinks and the outcome is inevitable.
The collective hysteria of commercial media, social media and political parties has made election fever permanent and has serious consequences for the workings of democracy. Efficiency suffers under the electoral calculus, legitimacy under the continual need to distinguish oneself, while time and again the electoral system ensures that the long term and the common interest lose out to the short term and party interests. Elections were once invented to make democracy possible, but in these circumstances they would seem to be a definite hindrance.
As if destined to rid the system once and for all of any hope of tranquillity, the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic and monetary crisis that followed it added fuel to the flames. Populism, technocracy and antiparliamentarianism have made their appearance and although not yet at the level of the 1930s, similarities to the situation in the 1920s are becoming more and more striking.
*
If the Founding Fathers in the United States and the heroes of the French Revolution had known in what context their method would be forced to function 250 years later, they would no doubt have prescribed a different model. Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark, not next to ideas but next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness? Would we still have the nerve to call what is in fact a bizarre, archaic ritual ‘a festival of democracy’?
Since we have reduced democracy to representative democracy and representative democracy to elections, a valuable system is now mired in deep difficulties. For the first time since the American and French revolutions, the next election has become more important than the last election, an astonishing transformation. An election gives only a very provisional mandate these days, and making the best of the system we have is becoming increasingly difficult, as democracy is brittle, more so than at any time since the Second World War. If we don’t watch out, it will gradually become a dictatorship of elections.
This process should not really surprise us. How many inventions of the late eighteenth century are still of much use in the present day – the stage coach, the air balloon, the snuffbox? It may not be a popular conclusion but it must be understood that nowadays elections are primitive and a democracy that reduces itself to elections is in mortal decline. It is indeed rather as if we were to limit air travel to the hot-air balloon, even though there are now high-tension cables, private planes, new climatic patterns, tornadoes and space stations.
New platforms are creating a new world and now the key question is, who will command the stage? Until the invention of printing, just a few hundred individuals – abbots, princes, kings – decided which texts were to be copied and which not, but the arrival of printing meant that suddenly thousands of people had that power. The old order was brought down by it and Gutenberg’s invention facilitated the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. With the arrival of social media it seems as if everyone has a printing press today, even as if everyone has a scriptorium at his or her disposal. The citizen is no longer a reader but an editor-in-chief, and this has caused a profound power shift which means large, established companies can be brought to their knees by the actions of a few dissatisfied customers.52 Apparently unshakeable dictatorships lose their grip on their populations once people organise themselves through social media. Political parties no longer bring voters together but are torn apart by them, as their classic patriarchal model of representation no longer works at a time when citizens have more of a say than ever before. Representative democracy is in essence a vertical model, but the twenty-first century is increasingly horizontal. Dutch professor of transition management Jan Rotmans said recently: ‘We go from centralised to decentralised, from vertical to horizontal, from top-down to bottom-up. It has taken us more than a hundred years to build this centralised, top-down, vertical society. That whole way of thinking is now being turned upside down. There is a great deal we need to learn and unlearn. The greatest barrier is in our heads.’53
Elections are the fossil fuel of politics. Whereas once they gave democracy a huge boost, much like the boost that oil gave the economy, it now it turns out they cause colossal problems of their own. If we don’t urgently reconsider the nature of our democratic fuel, a huge systemic crisis threatens. If we obstinately continue to hold on to the electoral process at a time of economic malaise, inflammatory media and rapidly changing culture, we will be almost wilfully undermining the democratic process.
How did we reach this point?