at everybody’s expense.’ Throughout, Trump portrays himself as the only man who can fix the problem of the system that has been broken by the elite: ‘I have no special interests but you, the American voter.’ The speech divides government from people and proceeds to widen the gap with every barb. There is a sort of secular blasphemy in the nastiness of Trump’s drearily inevitable conclusion: ‘We will drain the swamp in Washington DC and replace it with a new government of, by and for the people. Believe me.’ This is government of, by and for the populist.
Democracy in Crisis
Anti-politics is the most potent political idea of our time. The finest speeches in the popular tradition have always lent enchantment to politics, and it is salutary to be reminded of their magic. It would be naive, though, to ignore the worrying fact that the glamour has gone. We have mislaid the excitement of Cicero’s battle with Mark Antony, the struggle of Thomas Jefferson to create the new republic, Abraham Lincoln’s heroic attempt to salvage it, and John F. Kennedy’s sense of renewal. There may be little trace left of Barack Obama once President Trump has tweeted his way through a term of office. The land made in broad daylight, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous phrase about America, appears to be fading into the twilight. There is a dangerous claimant to the idea of popular power. An enticing new utopia is advertising its virtues. It is insurgent, protean and elusive and it goes by the misleading name of populism.
Democracy is in the midst of a crisis, but then it always is. As a system founded on the absorption and the negotiation of dissent, democracy invites sceptical voices. David Runciman, in The Confidence Trap, has pointed out that an excessive sensitivity to crisis, along with the ability to adapt their way out of the mess, are the twin characteristics of successful democracies. However, just because democracies have adapted their way out of messes before does not mean they will necessarily do so again. Just because politicians have hit upon the words in the past does not mean that they will do so in the future. The developed democracies face in strident chorus a threefold crisis of prosperity, of fear, and of confidence.
The crisis of prosperity is an anxiety about a future that the West appears to be losing. The fractious American and European politics of our time is in part explained by imminent economic decline. The West now has a potent rival in China. President Trump’s electoral slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, conceded the point. Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, has noted that, when America was growing at its fastest, living standards were doubling every thirty years. China has doubled its living standards three times in the last thirty years. But the threat is greater than the sheer numbers, and China is more than an economic rival. It is an affront to the very modus operandi of Western capitalism. Max Weber was the first serious thinker to note that capitalism thrived best under the conditions created by liberal democracy. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, by contrast, attribute their economic success to the tight control possible in a regime with no need to fret about the whims of the people. It seems to be working. The 2013 Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed that 85 per cent of Chinese were ‘very satisfied’ with their country’s direction. The number in the United States was just 31 per cent.
The growth of China threatens to break the monopoly that the democracies have enjoyed over capitalist prosperity. Just as this lesson was sinking in, developed capitalism suffered a self-inflicted crisis of its own. Financial hubris, which allowed the complexity of financial products to run ahead of the human capacity to regulate their effects, created a generational bust. For two decades in the USA and one in Britain, real wages have stagnated. In the USA, median net worth for every group except the wealthiest 10 per cent fell between 1998 and 2013. Working-class Americans experienced a decline in their net worth over that time of a staggering 53 per cent. Meanwhile, the richest 10 per cent of people got 75 per cent richer. The republican bargain, in which hard work receives its merited reward, seemed to have been breached. It is not surprising that the idea took hold that capitalism and liberal democracy were loaded in favour of the privileged. It is not surprising that only one in four voters in the bottom two social classes in Britain believe democracy addresses their concerns well.
The crisis of shared prosperity has created a climate of cynicism. At the same time, an even more basic threat has thrown the efficacy of liberal democracies into question. There is no more important task that the state takes on in the name of the people than to ensure safety. The apparent incapacity of liberal democracies in the face of external threat is creating a serious crisis of fear. The experience of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was intensely damaging. Two invasions ostensibly designed to replace a tyrant with the will of the people collapsed into military disaster. The Left now regards the Iraq invasion as proof that democracy is a code for American imperialism. The Right concluded that even dictatorial stability is preferable to the chaos of change.
The struggle to conclude a successful military adventure in the name of the people was one more apparent indication that the writ of the West would no longer run. The institutions created out of the ruins of the Second World War – the United Nations, the European Union and the Bretton Woods financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – appear bereft of power and irrelevant to the crises engulfing the world. Successive problems, in Ukraine and in Syria, appear to have passed power from the hands of democrats to eager tyrants. Russia and China are devising their own rules for the world diplomatic order.
Most potent of all, people in the liberal democracies have been subject to the fear of terror. In The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad described the invisible but palpable fear that governs a society under the threat of terrorist attack. The threat is all the more potent for being essentially invisible. The prospect of terrorism comes from no state, although states may turn a blind eye to its perpetrators or even sponsor them. It is a threat that can be activated by radicalised zealots, many of whom are reared in the comfort of free liberal democracies. Although one of the virtues of these democracies is that they tend not to rush towards a threat by negating the liberties that make them targets in the first place, there are always two temptations, to which some of their number may be yielding. The first is to blame a set of outsiders, usually these days the whole community of Muslims. The second is to repudiate some of the freedoms of the open society in the quest for a gilded cage of better security.
The crises of prosperity and fear make common cause to produce a crisis of confidence. After a century of progress, democracy appears to be in retreat. The fledgling democracies are struggling. Since the introduction of democracy in 1994, South Africa has been ruled by one party, the African National Congress, which has become progressively more self-serving. Turkey, which once seemed to combine moderate Islam with prosperity and democracy, is lapsing into corruption and autocracy under a leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has begun to tear up the secular liberalism on which his nation’s constitution was founded. In Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, opposition parties have boycotted recent elections or refused to accept their results.
In some democracies disenchantment threatens to tip into authoritarian rule. In Hungary Viktor Orbán openly declares that national needs trump liberal values such as freedom. In France, Marine Le Pen and her nativist Front National denounce a political establishment that she blames for betraying the white people of France. Similar tunes are played by the Danish People’s Party, the Swedish Democrats, the People’s Party of Switzerland and the notoriously Islamophobic Geert Wilders in Holland. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party stands accused of trampling on the country’s constitution to establish an ‘illiberal democracy’ of its own. But the most conspicuous setback for democracy has taken place in Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were high hopes for a democratic order in the old Soviet Union, but these hopes faded in 1999 when Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin. Putin, a former KGB operative, has since been both prime minister and president twice. He has muzzled the press, imprisoned opponents and presided over the murder of radical journalists, even as the display of democracy has been preserved.
The crisis of confidence is fuelled by impatience. Democracy has everywhere been a long time taking root, and it is unreasonable to expect that the transition will be either quick
