WHAT GAVE DEMOCRACY its first history and in due course carried it far beyond the confines of the Hellenic world was the vicissitudes of a word. After its first hectic and crowded two centuries, that word lingered on forlornly for almost two thousand years, waiting for history to catch up with it and turn it back into practical politics. Once re-appropriated, and quite fast, democracy picked up momentum and spread erratically across the globe for much of the next two centuries. Until history eventually did catch up with it again, democracy enjoyed a curious and relatively secluded, all but private, history of its own. But once history took it up in earnest, that dispersed and inconspicuous story merged rapidly and inextricably with the history of the world at large.
The two centuries that followed have proved drastic almost everywhere. They have left the world’s human population as deeply bemused by what has happened to it as it is by what it has collectively done. They make it hard for any of us to think clearly about what democracy now means, or how we should see or care about its bearing on our own lives. One conviction behind this book is that it would aid us greatly to see democracy today more clearly if we viewed it against the background of that distant first coming when it really did have a history of its own. That background still offers us a range of powerful thoughts about democracy’s strengths and limitations which came from long ago and quite far away. It also gives us, more importantly, the imaginative space to defamiliarize what has come to seem so obvious as to be all but self-evident, and no longer decently even open to doubt.
The emblematic figure for that misjudgment is the American political luminary Francis Fukuyama, whose The End of History and the Last Man (1992) ascribed to representative democracy a monopoly in coherent political aspiration across a comprehensively capitalist world. Fukuyama himself was always prudent enough to hedge his bets1 and has since written insightfully and at great length about the varying political resources and vulnerabilities of different forms of regime across the world.2 But it was not the hedges on its argument which gave his first work its global éclat, and this soberer and more instructive body of later reflection has yet to exert comparable pressure on popular political judgment in America or anywhere else.
Between Britain’s Brexit referendum of June 2016 and Italy’s Parliamentary election of 2018, a series of national political decisions has shown beyond any possibility of doubt that democracy in any of its current institutional formats is not today a reliable way for any national population to take its major political decisions. It does not serve to focus the character or implications of such decisions at all clearly. It conspicuously fails to provide the citizenry with effective opportunities to inform themselves of the challenges which face them over any time horizon. It ensures them very little chance until far too late to judge the personal qualities of those who compete to lead them and represent their interests over time (voters’ regret).3 Quite how destructive the outcomes of these recent episodes prove to be only time will tell; but no one could plausibly view them as successful exercises in collective deliberation or imaginatively compelling and politically effective authorizations of the figures who emerged as their immediate beneficiaries. Laid end to end, they have prompted many to wonder whether we have entered the twilight of a regime form. What they wholly fail to do is suggest any convincing candidate to replace it. At this point that is not a facility for which we have the leisure to start looking around.
If ever there was an opportunity to learn from political experience, the past decade has given us one. We now need to go on from when and where we are, and begin by trying to see that as clearly as we can. That is always a very difficult task.4 In the face of it, every invocation of the promise of democracy is an incitement not even to try to. Next time someone assures you of that promise, ask them sternly just what that promise was and is. You will receive no clear answer, still less one with any shred of plausibility. A promise the terms of which no one knows is worth exactly nothing. It is no promise at all.
There were causes for representative democracy’s expansion across the world, just as there were causes for its widespread and sometimes protracted episodes of subsequent territorial retreat.5 There were, and very much remain, reasons for citizens in the West, the territories of Benjamin Constant’s modern liberty,6 with their blowsy culture of endlessly elaborated consumption and their relentless commoditization of every form of value, to stand by the political frame which all of them have now adopted and defend it against every foe from within or without. But they cannot and must not expect that frame to solve the problems of their collective lives for them. Those problems are theirs alone to solve. At this stage in their staggeringly intricate and increasingly alarming history, they need to reach a far higher level of shared political intelligence in the face of those problems and do so in great haste. The shock of the decade from 2007 on has been the sharp drop in such intelligence across so much of the western world.
Democracy in its modern western sense is not a regime in which the people govern or choose what their government will actually do over anything. But it is a regime which must at intervals place itself at the mercy of their collective political judgment. It is precisely that jeopardy that makes it democracy at all.
What has made the jeopardy so acute over this grim decade has not been primarily the quality of their leaders.7 In the two leading states of the West over most of that period, the United States had a President of high intelligence, obvious decency of purpose, admirable patience, and intermittently impressive rhetorical force, and Germany has had a Chancellor of unusual political skill and determination. In every society the quality of political leadership at a given time has a large element of raw luck. The most politically discerning of citizenries can only pick between what they find themselves offered. The wisest and bravest of would-be political leaders can only lead those they can persuade to follow them. If it is to succeed as a political community today, any society needs to achieve and sustain a degree of mutual trust and cooperation. In the West today the great majority of societies have chosen representative democracy as the framework within which they struggle to do so. In that struggle, over the past decade, many, perhaps most, of them have manifestly in large measure failed. Even the most successful have imposed heavy costs on others by the means they have adopted to succeed: in the case of Germany, effectively the ruin of half the continent of Europe.
The result has been a cumulative souring of political relations and stultification of political choices across the democracies of the West in the face of two deep and protracted crises, neither of which is in any danger of ending in less than a generation. It has left them with an ever widening gap between what most of their populations now need or will need far into the future and what they still have and can realistically expect to enjoy in the decades that lie ahead. One of these crises is physical and ecological, the other in the first place economic. With the deeper of the two, the ecological, the degree of that failure at present may have been largely a matter of chance: the consequence of a narrow electoral outcome which would have come out the other way round under the constitution of almost any other state. (With the other, the economic, the causes of the political failure were more obviously structural.) But although their time frames are so different, the conjunction of the two at this point powerfully aggravates each. Their combined weight now threatens to crush the residual political capacities of the societies to which we belong, and at a point when these are already proven to be weakened.
The fecklessness of these choices and the scale of their prospective impact on their participants is fully matched by the flaws in the political, economic, and social architectures they have highlighted so glaringly. In quick succession Britain’s Brexit referendum and the elections of Presidents Trump and Macron showed a startling surge of mutual animosity across national populations, and a crushing dominance of the politics of enmity over those of friendship, and of conflict over cooperation in quest of a shared good. They also revealed a dismaying level of mutual distrust and contempt between their ordinary citizens and those competing to lead them.
Only the scale of this is at odds with what has long been the dominant vision of democratic politics in action amongst western political scientists: the image of a struggle between teams of largely career politicians competing for the citizens’ votes, and through these for the opportunity to govern them. There is ample realism within this picture; but what it misses is the exposure of the game in question to the consequences of its own outcomes over time. Participants, spectators, and professional observers alike do often view representative politics much as they view a sporting event. They recognize to varying degrees the imperatives of play on the field, the need to prioritize the very short term over the medium, let alone long term, the constant effort to manage impressions which incessantly slip away from control, the discomfitingly and unprepossessingly shifty relation to telling the truth.8 But to recognize is not always to forgive. When things go badly, and especially when they go worse and worse continuously for quite a long time, that knowing and worldly picture can alter sharply and resignation and even complicity give way to anger. A milieu which was always obviously alien now seems sleazy, malevolent, and menacing. Practices of privilege which long went largely unmarked now seem utterly indefensible and are no longer ignored or condoned. When their own physical safety and economic security are quite evidently at stake, no body of citizens could see politics just as a sport. As Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May put it in the face of one dramatic metropolitan terrorist atrocity: ‘Enough is enough!’9
Given this level of danger and anxiety, the democracy of today faces severe and very evident legitimatory overstrain. It has come to overpromise incontinently and has lost whatever capacity it ever had to explain coherently the basis of the authority it now needs to claim. In practice legitimacy is always largely a matter of resignation, and sustained resignation can rest only on habit. Where habits need to change and change fast, they can do so only for salient and stably compelling reasons or by compulsion: the enforcement of prompt and ready submission. In practice again, reasons alone will never prove salient and stably compelling enough to carry the full strain; and submission on its own is unlikely to fill the gap. As Hobbes showed with stunning force and clarity more than three and a half centuries ago, there is no hope of making particular political decisions seem right to all the members of any sizeable human grouping. Because of this, and because of the dangers which dissenting humans pose to one another, what can be made to seem right is at most a common framework fully authorized to make decisions for them whenever it deems decision to be necessary and to do so on everyone’s behalf. What we need, and hence need to legitimate effectively, is above all else a framework within which to live together in relative safety and amity: what liberal philosophers now frequently condescend to as a modus vivendi.
Those who cannot live together must either learn to do so or else live apart. Any means for effecting the second, within the infinite and tightly woven web of a capitalist globe, can only prove horrendous. Disentangling even a continent-wide web in the aftermath of Brexit is bound to be appallingly complex and painfully provocative. Democracy presupposes a state over which to hold sway. It presupposes a people accustomed to live together and reconciled to continuing to do so, and a settled territory within which to try to. At present it is far from clear that the state still known as the United Kingdom satisfies any of these three conditions. There is nothing that democracy can do to endow it with them. A community deeply at odds over its own membership and identity must find new bonds of unity or manage the pain of secession to minimize the damage it will inevitably inflict. There are no painless secessions, just as there are no real victors in civil wars, even where there are the plainest of losers.
In a western democracy today each people (or nation) forms a single structure of mutual co-dependence. Each democratic state is a state by permission of its own people, and each people (or nation) is and remains such in and through its own state. Where people and state fail to match, democracy no longer clearly applies and people and state are each in question. Under these conditions there is no external criterion of political value or source of political authority with the slightest prospect of exerting the force needed to adjudicate between these competing claims.
The case for accepting the authority of democracy is partly practical and partly imaginative. Of the two grounds the practical is much the more robust but simply has no bearing on issues of secession. The democracies of the West have proved quite effective political communities for much of the past seven decades, in most European cases from a most unpromising start,10 however much less convincing they have proved in many respects for the past two decades. With the exception of Germany itself, they have enjoyed their success largely in their current formats and as the states they now are. Where that format is now in question, this record of relative success is itself a powerful argument in favour of continuity. But in all such cases it already faces other powerful arguments for a definite alternative. At that point, however the category of democracy is invoked, whatever force it carries must rest on the imaginative case for accepting it.
This is not a book about why the welfare states of the European continent (or their counterparts on other continents) have worked as well as they have from the viewpoint of their own citizens. It merely tries to explain why it is democracy on which they have chosen to rest their legitimacy and to isolate what it is about democracy that has so appealed to them.
I have tried, by the story I tell, to show what it is about the modern western version of democracy that equipped it to win the competition to authorize governments in most of the wealthier countries in the world, and what renders that authorization so vulnerable in repeated use. The authorization which electoral democracy offers is exaggerated, but it is not merely specious. Unfortunately, though, it is also grossly insufficient to authorize what these societies now require from their governments, and that insufficiency becomes ever more glaring through repeated use. My main and most perturbing claim is that that insufficiency is structural, not contingent. It was already clearly apparent before democracy established its durable sway over any European state. It was implicit from the outset in the terms of Buonarroti’s epochal struggle between the Order of Egoism and the Order of Equality.11 It has been far less salient over the lengthy history of the United States than in any other state in the world; and the power and prominence of the United States over the past century have given that salience a misleading air of pertinence to the rest of the world. But in this sole but devastatingly important respect the obsessive and mildly paranoid eye of Buonarroti saw more deeply than Tocqueville, for all the latter’s incomparably greater depth and sophistication.
The appeal of democracy is the appeal of and to equality. It is that appeal which renders it both potent and potentially universal. But in any contemporary political setting it is also what makes it hopelessly evanescent or blatantly insincere. Evanescence and insincerity are alike fatal to authorization. Momentary authorization holds little, if any, continuing authority: on current evidence ever less as decades go by. At the moment of election the equality of the vote seems to promise a kind of equality to all who choose to exercise it. But nothing else about the lives of citizens before or afterwards confirms their equality with one another. Any sense of equality in authorizing those who govern them is obliterated remorselessly by the economic forces which structure every other aspect of their lives. It takes a particular kind of training in economics to see the totality of those forces as any kind of order at all; and no sane person could see them at any point in anyone’s lifetime, or in any respect, as structured by equality. The sole candidate for a principle ordering them in practice, the market, is always for every human who acts upon it an external structure of power which calibrates whatever resources they bring to it against those brought by everyone else who chooses to enter it. All that principle can handle in strictly equal proportion is those resources: what has been brought to it, never the humans who have brought it there. But it is always the humans who must accept those outcomes, and along with them everything these imply for the lives they are trying to live. The demise of legal privilege marked the end of one kind of whimsical inequality. The market provides another, every bit as whimsical and vastly more pervasive.
The market, of course, was very much there already by the time of Thermidor; but it has widened and deepened enormously since then, and its enticements and repulsions have fluctuated dramatically ever since. In protracted passages of economic growth,12 those attractions have usually carried far more weight than its repulsions. Amid the miseries and terrors of World War, governments have often compressed markets and minimized their provocations deliberately and with some care. But since 1980 growth has slowed appreciably across most of the western world; and since the crisis of 2008 it has all but ceased for lengthy intervals in many western countries. Under these conditions domestic inequalities in wealth and income in individual countries became far more obtrusive,13 and their geographical incidence came to carry much harsher implications.
Whatever else they had in common, the Brexit referendum and the election of President Trump represented a rejection of that outcome by large areas in each country, in neither case in favour of a programme of economic reconstruction with the slightest prospect of reversing the cumulative social and economic destruction they had undergone. It is not a defect in democracy to have failed to provide that programme. Democracy is just a structure of political choice. It is no providential guarantee of the wisdom or adequacy of the choices presented to any citizen body. Especially, on the evidence of the past two centuries, it is no guarantee of the social sensitivity or economic intelligence of the approaches to benefiting a majority of citizens which will be proposed to them, still less of the personnel who end up governing them. In a world ever more dominated by capitalist relations, the economic visions of citizens at large, of economic professionals, and of those competing to govern them play out against each other constantly, with no clear practical primacy between them, and no compelling account of why any of the three should defer to either of the others.14 This puts a weight on Hobbes’s simple argument for recognizing and defending the state’s authority which it plainly cannot bear.
The modern western understanding of democracy blurs the simplicity of this argument by invoking a level of intimacy and ingratiation at which Hobbes himself was too wise ever to hint. In practice therefore, as we should now be well placed to see, it not only weakens the rational force of his argument but further compounds that weakening by inciting a toxic blend of resentment, hurt, and disappointment at the failure of the policies adopted to remedy even the most widely acknowledged of social ills. The mechanics of electoral democracy encourage citizens at large to blame one another or blame whichever politicians prevail in the elections for every feature of their shared lives which they seriously dislike. Those mechanics do deplorably little to bring into clear focus anywhere at all just what range of options is available to a national population at any given time, still less to equip them to decide what it would be best for them to do at that point. In both the Brexit referendum and the Trump election, they plainly did provide the citizens in question with a remarkable opportunity: the chance, within the current structure, to reject something they were eager to reject. In neither case was this rejection combined with any trace of clarity in deciding what to do instead.
This was especially striking in the case of the Brexit referendum, the single most drastic opportunity in the entire history of the United Kingdom or any of its national components for its full citizens to take in person a decision certain to affect all their lives for as many decades into the future as they happened to live. The result had an immediacy and aberration of judgment far in excess of the Athenian Assembly’s catastrophic decision to launch the Sicilian expedition, as well as a considerably more chaotic approach to determining who exactly was to decide how to carry out the venture.15 In that simple and peremptory sense it was the most starkly democratic moment in the history of the nation (or nations) concerned. It was an opportunity, too, which a high proportion of these citizens chose to seize, despite the unusually inclement weather, presumably both because of the strength of their feelings about the choice and because they had at least some sense of what a unique opportunity it afforded. Not only was it the single most consequential political choice which Britain’s citizens have ever taken in person, it was also in one respect a very clear choice. The choice to remain, the choice which their then Prime Minister David Cameron enjoined them to make and firmly assumed that they would, was a choice to go on, insofar as lay within their own hands, with their lives as these currently were and do so within the existing political and economic framework. If ever there are political choices which those who make them can reasonably be supposed to understand, that was one. But the choice they did make was just the opposite. It was to launch their lives instead into a quite different framework of which none of them could reliably see even the haziest of outlines and none could therefore have the slightest comprehension. It was also a choice travestied ludicrously and brazenly by all who incited them to make it.
Representative democracy today, as at every earlier point in its history, works far better as a mechanism for rejection than it can as a way of choosing together what course to follow for any length of time. It is especially effective for rejecting a set of rulers who have ruled for a considerable period already. No population may know in the requisitely instructive detail quite what they collectively on balance want; but it is sometimes comfortably within their powers to identify whom they have come to find insufferable. Insufferable rulers concentrate the mind; but they concentrate it quite narrowly: far too narrowly to ensure (or even render particularly likely) the acquisition of replacements who can be relied on to do any better. Rejecting a set of rulers can have all the intensity and definition of personal dislike; but acquiring a fresh set of rulers is a far more diffuse and inchoate exercise in hope. This disparity is even more glaring in the case of a referendum, where what was at issue was not a set of persons, but a whole new legal and economic order. It was less like a legislative or Presidential election than the choice of a whole fresh Constitution, the terms of which were as yet necessarily almost entirely unknown. That was an ill-considered choice to make and an even sillier choice for any current government to offer to the citizens who had given it the authority to govern them. But the folly of the nature of the choice was not the fault of the citizens at large. The opportunity to make it, and the terms of the choice itself, were not decided by them but put to them. Any unwisdom on their part in either respect lay in the direction in which they chose to make it.
In most ways the election of President Trump was a very different sort of choice. It was in the first place a choice, not by, but against, the will of the majority of those who took the trouble to make it, since millions more electors voted for his principal opponent, Hillary Clinton, a figure about whose political conduct they were certainly, however unreliably, more extensively informed. Only one of the most idiosyncratic features of its eighteenth-century Constitution (and one which reflected the Founders’ acute distrust of democracy) transposed that comfortably conventional democratic outcome into rendering Donald Trump President. Since the choice also fell on someone with no prior political experience, no record of any kind of public service, and a degree of temperamental incontinence unmatched by any earlier President for at least a century and on incessant and highly prominent public display, it was in some ways even more surprising. But as the succession to a public office filled without interruption at four-year intervals for well over two centuries, and as evidently needed today as it was in the days of George Washington, it was also a much less distinctive process. What it had in common with the Brexit referendum was the breadth and depth of the antipathies it elicited. More important, it was also the fact that those antipathies were directed not merely at the economic circumstances of large areas of the country, but quite explicitly also at its ruling institutions and very many of the personnel who had recently occupied them.
Both the United States and Great Britain now choose at regular intervals who is to govern them for a period of time and do so by weighing the attractions and plausibility of those who volunteer themselves to govern. Each places much of the burden of framing the options to be offered on political parties of varying longevity and political continuity over time. These political parties in turn exist in part to press some range of options against others, but pick the options they decide to press on each occasion to some degree by the appeal they expect them to exert to those who must choose or reject them for the purpose. Selecting an individual to exercise great personal political power is a different kind of choice from choosing a prospective government with an extended programme of policies. It is less a deliberation over what to do than a decision about whom to trust (or at least whom to distrust less). At present in the United States neither the choice between the parties in legislative elections nor the choice between party candidates in Presidential elections can be said to offer electors very clear options for their future in either respect. The outcome of the Presidential election in 2016 was scarcely an expression of personal trust in either party’s candidate. If the point of democracy as a system of government is to identify and ensure the adoption of the most plausible content of a common good, it is hard to see how anyone could view the American elections of 2016 as realising it.
Ever since classical Athens political regimes in Europe itself, and later also in its far-flung diaspora, have been assessed in part at their most ambitious by how well suited they were to realising a good common to those who live in them. For most of that time the good in question has been imagined solely on the terms of quite small and highly privileged minorities. The political victory of representative democracy as a regime form marked a firm rejection of the narrowness and partiality of those terms. Its passage across the world, whatever else it has meant in one setting after another, has carried at least that rejection with it. But neither in Europe nor in its diaspora, nor in any of the countries where that diaspora failed sooner or later to supplant their previous inhabitants, has the coming of representative democracy repudiated that categorical rejection of overt privilege. What democracy now means across the world, however travestied it may be in its local embodiment, is that all adult citizens are both entitled and adequately equipped to judge the good for themselves, and press the claims of their own judgment relentlessly on one another on a basis of equality. To challenge that view explicitly is to reject the authority of democracy, as the military governments of Thailand and Myanmar both did in the second decade of the present century, in each case following protracted and often bloody precedent. Comparable degrees of exclusion, if on very different criteria, were also carried through a little later in Turkey and Poland, once again by modifying their Constitutions to implement the outcome required by the incumbent and prevent its subsequent democratic reversal.
Only in the French Presidential and Parliamentary elections of 2017 did the country contrive to hold elections which reached a clear outcome on a basis which plainly did reflect the balance of judgment across its citizen body over which political grouping was best positioned to assess and realise a national good which, if it might be less than common, was at least very widely shared. There was no more reason to anticipate that these outcomes would prove more felicitous in the French case than in Britain’s mesmerizing procession of blunders, the acquisition of President Trump, or the construction of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s edifice of personal domination. But it certainly was a remarkable exhibition of political persuasion by a single figure with relatively limited prior political experience. As with the triumphs of Brexit and President Trump, it was above all a moment of rejection, and rejection especially of every existing équipe of career politicians. A brief and apparently unbesmirched political record, a blend of confidence, intelligence, and animal spirits, and a sharp eye for political opportunity proved sufficient not just to catapult Emmanuel Macron into the Presidency of France as a candidate of assertively individual self-confidence. They also swept the great majority of candidates from the previous parties of government out of legislative seats in which many had long been well entrenched, in favour of a hastily improvised new party whose legislative agenda was confined to sustaining its new President. In Britain, in painful contrast, the radical unclarity of what Brexit would mean in practice was aggravated by the humiliating completeness of the political confusion generated by Theresa May’s election in June 2017, which left the country entering the tense negotiation over the terms of its national future bereft of a government with the nerve even to describe its residual goals, or of any grounds whatever for hoping to carry the consent of the legislature to whatever settlement it might still contrive to be offered.
Democracy, like every other form of regime, has its happier and its less happy episodes. For much of the post-war period across North America, Western Europe, and Japan, it saw protracted periods of relative felicity as economies grew, welfare systems were extended, and the lives of most citizens visibly improved along with them. By 2000 at the latest that was no longer clearly the case, the rewards of residual growth were shared far more inequitably, and large areas in almost every country were blighted in ways for which it became ever clearer that no one knew any effective remedy. It was the last point which was decisive. If you have no idea what to do, no way of taking the decision how to act can help you. Where things have plainly been going very badly for much of the population for very long, indefinite indecision is unlikely to prove the best policy. Populations do not reject on the scale and with the spatial continuity of the Brexit referendum without good reason; but the means it offered Britain’s citizens for doing so on that occasion were lethally ill-suited to yielding the results they wished for. To echo the terms of Rossini’s classic verdict on the music of Wagner: it was, for anyone who yearned for democracy, a lovely moment in a truly infernal quarter of an hour.16
Is there in any sense a crisis for democracy? There are all too many reasons to see this as a time of crisis. Since the feature of our existing political institutions on which we most explicitly pride ourselves is their democratic character, it is especially dismaying to hold that character in any way responsible for its being so. What is clear is merely that these institutions have yet to identify a convincing response to it, and that much of the responses they have mustered up to now shows massive elements of denial. It is not a new suspicion that democracy may be susceptible to denial; but there is no case as yet to suppose that any rival form of political order is any better proofed against it.17 Up to 2017 it was distressingly clear that these institutions have largely failed us and done so for some time consecutively. Is there any reason to believe that they will continue to do so?
They have certainly failed us most abjectly at the level of political comprehension. We manifestly do not collectively understand the crises which face us. We cannot see together which elements within them derive from which, or even which aggravate which; and we show little, if any, sign of beginning to grasp any of them any better. But it is in no way obvious that it has been our political institutions themselves which are perpetuating this impasse.
At least six distinct elements have come together to generate it. The first and most obtrusive is the very different rhythm of a global economy in which none of the main engines of global growth can still move at the same momentum and none shows any sign of recovering the capacity to do so. This has discouraging implications virtually everywhere, though far worse, as ever, for some populations than others. The fast-shrinking and aging population of Japan, for example, has no prospect of recovering the economic dynamism or the burgeoning prosperity it enjoyed three decades ago; but barring large-scale military conflict in Japan’s immediate vicinity, its people should be able to go on at quite a comfortable level for as long as the world around them permits anyone to do so. The rapid global slowing of economic growth has made the conditions of international trade predictably more fractious and done little to moderate the animosities between states and populations forged over the past two centuries. But it did not create these animosities; and there never was a time when trade at any distance was without its jealousies.18
The second element, directly linked to the first, is the intensifying movement of human beings in very large numbers from the poorer and more ravaged parts of the world towards the richer and less disrupted countries in which it is far easier to make a less wretched life. The winners and losers from these huge migrations amongst the existing inhabitants of the recipient societies largely overlap with those who are already winning or losing from the trajectory of their economies, so the process of flight or migration strongly reinforces prior divisions of sentiment or interest. Since we lack a single compelling conception of where human beings ought to be, we have innumerable warring arguments to justify welcoming fresh immigration or struggling, however vainly, to impede or even prevent it. We have no hope of finding a common standard to assess which response is right or wrong (or right for and wrong to whom), let alone wise or foolish. If too many arrive too fast, the most successful society in Europe today can feel itself unable to cope, as Chancellor Merkel found to her cost; and the nastiest and silliest of responses may yield short-term political advantages to those with the stomach to espouse them. Democracy is ill-equipped to handle this kind of issue because it divides the People it entitles to decide over questions of boundaries and membership in the face of a challenge plainly from the outside, highlights the fissures in identification between them, and offers them no convincingly shared criteria either for what is likely to benefit them or for what they have an evident duty to do. If the optimal scale and character of immigration is a judgment of interest and the due provision of refuge a clear and peremptory duty of charity, we simply have no common metric for either, let alone for trading off each against the other. There is no doubt of the scale and urgency of this challenge. As the Vice President of the European Commission put it in July 2017: ‘Everybody needs to do their part in this across Europe. The whole idea of European co-operation is that if one of us gets into trouble, the others will come and help. This migration issue will not go away. Not today, not tomorrow, not next year, not next decade, not for two decades. This is a global phenomenon that will be with us for generations. We’d better find sustainable solutions.’19 It is not clear that there are sustainable solutions, and even if there were, democracy could do nothing to ensure that we find them.
The third element, thus far quite marginal in practical effect but disproportionately unnerving in its imaginative impact (as it is fiercely intended to be), has been the onset of indiscriminate atrocities inflicted in the name of a militant Islam. Whatever its consequences for civil liberties prove to be over time, this need be no challenge to democracy itself, since it reaches far less deeply into the pre-existing political divisions between the current inhabitants of any country and has nothing to offer to fellow Muslims with any desire to continue to live there and all too much to threaten them in their efforts to do so.
The fourth element is the transformation in our ways of moving, not goods or human bodies, with all the promise and menace each can bear, but information around the world. The awesome speed and uncontrollable instabilities of the world-wide web have opened up to communities across the world possibilities of interpretation and reaction at a speed far beyond our capacities for comprehension and disrupted the modest repertoire for cooperation and political choice which the countries of the West had accumulated over the preceding three centuries and more. They make it possible to mobilize support within a community for a particular objective with extraordinary rapidity; but they also make it possible to establish levels of intimacy in personal repression well beyond the imagination of even George Orwell. Thus far they seem better suited to making our political responses shallower, hastier, and more impatient than to deepening them or rendering us more aware or sensitive to their implications for others. They are manifestly not at present building better societies.
The fifth element, unlike the others, does arise directly in and from democracy in the form now operative in the West. It is an aspect of the ecology of the political class, and especially of the role within it of those acting at the time as professional politicians in government or the legislature. What is clear throughout the western democracies is that the level of esteem and trust towards these figures is now abysmally, and perhaps unprecedentedly, low. It is also fairly clear what has generated this effect and what continuously reinforces it: principally the conditions of political competition within these states, and above all the greatly diminished seclusion of the setting within which their political leaders and representatives must act. In that setting, the requirements for competing effectively and the incentives prompting their choices become damagingly obvious, and the more edifying purpose of serving any discernible conception of the public good is seldom apparent. Government, almost as much as public speech, becomes a ceaseless exercise in impression management,20 and the impressions proffered are as harshly lit by journalists as they are by political adversaries. Measured and scrupulous choice of policy, focused steadily on long-term public good, becomes ruinously costly politically; and those who continue to attempt it are unlikely to survive the competition for long.
Some of these features of political competition are immemorial—as evident in the Athenian Assembly or the Tudor Court, as in the U.S. Congress or 10 Downing Street. What has changed in western democracies today, in contrast with six decades ago, is partly the immediacy and glare of publicity, partly the length of time over which their public performance as regimes can and will now be judged, and partly the cumulative impact on them of the first four elements. Most democracies come into existence through the failure of previous regimes and, like their predecessors, hold such authority as they can muster mainly by the degree to which they succeed better than their predecessors. Protracted failure erodes the legitimacy of any regime.21 Neither governing nor competing for office in western democracies today offers obvious facilities to restore it. It is hard to judge whether politicians today are any more corrupt, ruthless, or unprincipled than their predecessors. They certainly appear so to a mass audience; and that appearance in turn greatly weakens their capacity to appear any better or act any more effectively. When politicians do surmount such challenges, they do so, as Max Weber insisted,22 by personal gifts which cannot be identified beforehand or independently of their very success.
So far, so bad; but the sixth element is quite different and far more alarming. It is the threat, ever more absurd to deny, that human beings are destroying the conditions of their own existence at an ever more hectic pace. How fast, and how irreversibly, they are doing so, no one can yet know; but we do now know vastly more about how they are doing so, and it is quite evident, physically, chemically, and biologically, that they are doing so at breakneck speed. The record of western democracies thus far in the face of this immense challenge has been at best uneven and at worst abominable. One of their firmer merits, however, can at least aid us to judge why it has been quite so poor. The relative freedom of speech and inquiry they permit and sometimes still claim to guarantee means that we can, if we choose, allocate responsibility for the weakness of that performance between the extent to which their reigning politicians have corrupted those who elected them, or the electors instead corrupted their would-be political leaders. Either way, this form of democracy is implicated in the present outcome. It may not preclude us acting as absurdly and indefensibly, but there has never been any reason to expect that it would. The question it leaves open is whether this ensures that it cannot or will not enable us to stop doing so in time.
In the democracies of the West these are now the key challenges of living together. Democracy is no talisman against any of them. But it is quite wrong to blame any of them on democracy. It is not it that has caused them, and it is we, not it, that will determine how well we learn to face them. The fault, if fault there proves to be, will not lie in our stars or even in the career or amateur politicians we pick to govern us. It will lie in us. That is what democracy promises, and even in the muted form in which the citizens of the West at present enjoy it, it is what democracy will deliver.