What Matters Now Winter 2020: Fearing and Hoping for a Crisis of Democracy

Debate rages across new books about the viability of democracy in the twenty first century. In this What Matters Now review essay, Senior Editor James Cairns says the real battle playing out isn’t what it seems

Is democracy in crisis?

The political scientist Yascha Mounk recently bragged that he knew democracy was in crisis before it was cool to say so. The author of 2018’s “The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It” may be making a dubious claim to originality, but he’s right that it’s currently very much in fashion to say something about what’s perceived to be the democratic crisis of our time.

Since Trump won the presidency in 2016, top-selling books about politics include “Democracy and its Crisis” (by AC Grayling), “How Democracy Ends” (by David Runciman), “How Democracies Die” (by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt), and “Crises of Democracy” (by Adam Przeworski). Along with countless scholarly articles and op-ed pieces, each book responds to some variation of the question: “Is democracy in crisis?”

The “Yes” side points to familiar evidence. Trust in political institutions is low and falling. Voter turnout has dropped since the 1970s, as has the rate of party membership. Polarized parties and personality-driven, negative campaigns restrict rational civic debate. Unelected executive powers dominate representative institutions. Elite economic actors hold massive sway over legislative decision-making. Anti-democratic, far-right political movements are growing, and have made electoral gains in some jurisdictions. In the United States, special concern is devoted to the anti-democratic character of the Electoral College and the Senate.

The “No” side responds with its case. Voter participation rates dropped significantly in the late 1960s and 1970s, but since then have remained relatively stable. In some countries, rates have increased slightly in recent years. The political scientists Jacques Thomassen and Carolien van Ham note that while trust in politicians is low in many places, there continues to be “high levels of national pride and high levels of support for democracy as an ideal political regime.” Besides, disgruntled citizens don’t necessarily imply system-crisis. Harvard professor Pippa Norris calls the crisis narrative a fashionable “myth,” short on facts, fuelled by hyperbole. Boys-who-cry-wolf clamour for attention in every generation (and, as Astra Taylor explains, when it comes to penning Big Books on democracy, it truly is a boys’ club).

I’m skeptical of books claiming to resolve the debate once and for all. For one thing, as just about everybody who writes on the topic acknowledges, the term crisis carries widely different meanings. It can refer to a relatively benign rough patch; but it can also mean a moment of extreme, unsustainable instability: imminent transformation. Every democratic crisis is unique: the collapse of Weimar Germany is not Pinochet’s coup. Yet in Runciman’s book, democracy has always been in crisis. The history of democracy is the history of “putting off the evil day.” Depending on how you define crisis, then, being “in” one could mean existential transformation, or it could mean muddling through. 

Democracy, too, is a contested term. What, exactly, is in crisis? Are we concerned about the fulsome execution of the general will in all areas of life? Or best practices of postwar American presidents?  

The crisis debates involve contrasting assumptions, contested definitions of key categories, and no agreement on how to measure a democratic crisis. That means that no amount of new survey data, no scary Trump tweet or uptick in voter rates will answer the riddle of whether democracy is in crisis or not. 

We can learn something, however, from asking: What’s being expressed by the debate over the crisis of democracy? What explicit and implicit assumptions and concerns are fuelling all these words about crisis? 

The political stakes of crisis – who gains and who loses through foundational change – are central to whether we see crises develop, but those stakes are virtually never discussed in democracy-in-crisis books. One way to reframe the debate in order to highlight these political stakes is to ask of each new title on the subject: Is this book being framed by hope or fear? Instead of dividing the debate up in terms of who says there’s a crisis and who says there’s not, I’ve begun asking: What is it you hope for, what is it you fear?  

Remapping the crisis debate

Observers who write from fear to declare that liberal democracy is indeed in crisis are what I call liberal catastrophists. The historian Niall Ferguson, for example, is terrified that “liberal democracy as we know it won’t survive the twenty first century.” Falling economic productivity and growing inequality will intensify social unrest. Social media foment extremism, hollowing out the political centre. Young people who don’t want to have their feelings hurt by opposing points of view will fail to protect the liberalism of our democratic institutions. The institutions of liberal democracy won’t survive these blows. After that, the deluge.

In “Ill Winds,” the political scientist Larry Diamond argues that core liberal democratic institutions – elections, the party system, representative government, mass media – are being attacked from within and without. Populist authoritarian movements in liberal democratic heartlands, and interference from non-democratic China and Russia are “avidly undermining democracies and liberal values around the world.” Citizens are giving up on a system rooted in first-past-the-post elections, gerrymandering, and politicized courts.

And it’s not only institutional failure that strikes fear in liberal catastrophists. Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of “How Democracies Die,” write that when democratic norms erode, the very institutions we thought were bulwarks of popular power “become political weapons” by which “democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, even legally – to kill it.”  

Liberal catastrophists assume that liberal democracy is the apex of history. Only something worse could come after it. On the assumption that liberal democracy has been working just fine, or at least did during its imagined Golden Age, liberal catastrophists become very worried when encountering trends perceived as challenging existing relations of power. Even minor shifts in voting rates or opinion polls are worrisome. Pending political collapse is detected in the public’s modest ideological polarization. Threats appear on both the right and left: Trump’s creeping authoritarianism and Corbyn’s left-populism are both corrosive to the postwar status quo. Look at liberal pundits quake in the shadow of Bernie Sanders’ rise in popularity, even as Sanders’ vision of democratic socialism is perfectly compatible with the liberal democratic order. The British political scientist David Runciman writes that liberal democracy is more in mid-life crisis than in its final phase. We’ve only just begun the final act, Runciman concludes; but make no mistake: “this is how democracy ends.”

Other observers agree that liberal democracy is in crisis, but view this trajectory from a place of hope. The introductory editorial of the revolutionary Marxist journal Salvage argues that among the “good news” for twenty-first century radicals is the fact that “there is a global legitimacy crisis in representative democracy.” These revolutionary optimists want a fundamental break with the status quo. They welcome the crisis not because there is joy in dancing on the rubble of the present, but in the hope of rebuilding a better world from the ruins. Crises are, by definition, transformative. They mark a division between the old and the new. 

Alessandro Bonanno’s “The Legitimation Crisis of Neoliberalism” exemplifies the revolutionary optimist’s take. Bonanno writes that the market economy’s persistent obstruction of democratic promises of freedom and equality has created “a crisis of system integration.” A profit-driven capitalist economy is not compatible with “the claim of the existence of a democratic society.” This has always been the case. What’s different about today, Bonnano says, is the relatively recent destruction of the postwar strategy of managing these contradictions through state regulation that ensured a modicum of economic and social security for the majority of the population. 

At the start of the twenty first century, people’s experience of “unmet social promises of social stability, economic growth, and general well-being” has caused them to lose faith in liberal democracy. Hence the wave of mass rebukes to politics-as-usual: Occupy Wall Street, the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, the ongoing strike wave in France. The complex political-economic glue that held liberal democracy together for seventy years has come unstuck. The status-quo has been broken to the point of no return. This sounds a lot like liberal catastrophism, except revolutionary optimists welcome the fall of the current order. 

Bonanno offers no guarantee that the post-crisis new order will be democratic, to say nothing of whether it will be eco-socialist. He recognizes the need for mass struggle to transform existing conditions into real democracy, to prevent the mess of our moment from lapsing into barbarism. But like all revolutionary optimists, he declares that the current order “has arrived at a point of unsustainable crisis.” This is a good thing. It is the responsibility and hope of radicals to seize the moment.

A third group in the crisis debates, call them revolutionary pessimists, are no less desirous of social transformation; however, they fear that liberal democracy has not entered a true crisis situation. Regrettably, in the eyes of the revolutionary pessimist, we are not on the cusp of major change.

Nancy Fraser, a political philosopher at the New School, shares Bonanno’s understanding of the contradiction between democracy and capitalism. In a sense, rule by the people has always been in crisis under capitalism, inasmuch as its promises – of freedom, of equality, of popular power – are necessarily undermined by liberal democracy’s separation of the economic sphere from popular control. Fraser agrees that in the post-2008 landscape these contradictions have become more acute and periodically caused governments to break down. However, to move from tensions within liberal democratic states to a full-blown crisis of liberal democracy would require not only mass discontent (which Fraser agrees there is), but political vehicles able to channel disaffection into an oppositional force capable of transforming society. 

There simply is not that kind of counter-politics in the current moment, in no small part because political-economic restructuring since the 1970s has largely been about destroying challenges from below. There is radically progressive opposition. But it’s fragmented and episodic, not nearly what would be necessary to reorient the political trajectory away from the destructive power of capitalism, toward meaningful democratic renewal.     

But just because the progressive advances within liberal democracy are being rolled back, don’t make the mistake, says Fraser, of assuming this means liberal democracy is dying. Rights and protections for the most vulnerable are relatively recent additions to the Western democratic order. They were only ever won through the sustained, mass mobilization of people from below. Democracies in the West have always privileged certain groups over others. Racial segregation was official US policy until the 1960s. A new law in Quebec openly attacks religious minorities with a ban on what people may wear that disproportionately harms Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews. A new phase of illiberalism is perfectly compatible with democracy in its modern form. 

Social struggle, not the inherent character of liberal democracy, determines to what extent minority rights, labour protections, sexual freedom, civil liberties and so on become part of a particular democracy at a particular moment in history. In other words, exploitation can become far more severe, and social oppression can worsen, but that doesn’t necessarily mean liberal democracy will fall. 

When I asked political scientist David McNally what constitutes a liberal democracy, he told me: “liberal democracy means the enshrinement of capitalist property rights within a system of power only formally accountable to elected representatives. In fact, the property rights and privileges of capitalists are legally entrenched and protected by bureaucratic and executive power in ways that hamstring elected officials. Substantively, capitalist property and power are beyond democratic control. So, while the system allows for electoral processes, it locks in structural constraints that prevent those elected from undermining the economic dominance of capitalist interests.”

As a form of rule by the people, then, liberal democracy is partial, alienating, and limits the possibility of achieving full democracy in all areas of life. Yet in the absence of a revolutionary agent – the mass, organized expression of counter-politics – the system has not been forced into a crisis situation. The revolutionary pessimist writes in fear that we have yet to see the worst in our prevailing political-economic order.

Surveying contemporary conflict and the longstanding challenges within liberal democracy, the liberal triumphalist focuses on the resiliency of the system and writes in hope of its long-term survival. The lodestar of this perspective is the 2017 Oxford University Press edited collection “Myth and Reality of the Legitimacy Crisis.” The book assumes that liberal democracy depends on the mass consent of the governed. It piles up empirical evidence suggesting that there is no significant threat to this mass consent. Claims that we’re currently going through a democratic crisis are simply not borne out by survey data. The book’s editors favourably cite an earlier book on the so-called crisis of politics in Europe: “There are few signs of a general decline in trust, confidence in public institutions, political interest, or faith in democracy; nor is there much evidence of an increase in apathy.” Everything is fine; nothing to see here.  

Like the liberal catastrophist, and contra radical optimists and pessimists alike, the triumphalist believes that Western democracy is the highest form of politics. Listen to former Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff in a recent Munk Debate predict that liberal democracy will flourish throughout the twenty first century: “Liberal democracy’s intricate balance of a majority rule counterbalanced by minority rights, judicial review, rule of law, and free media are perfectly built over many centuries to deal with our fundamental political problem, which is political and social disagreement.” To triumphalists like Ignatieff, Trump’s impeachment and Britain’s exit from the European Union are not signs of liberal democracy’s weakness; rather, they show “liberal democracy functioning as it should.” 

A recent triumphalist perspective published in the right-wing National Review argues that the very institutions accused of causing the crisis – the Electoral College, the anti-majoritarian character of the Senate, free markets, and rule by elites – are what allow modern experiments in democracy to function, and keep mob rule from destroying civilized government. Who really gives a spit about middling voter rates? State and business policymakers know best, and their authority is not seriously in question.

Liberal triumphalists say, “Is democracy in crisis? Of course not!” Western institutions were built to last. They are characterized by resiliency, not weakness in the face of periodic challenges. And this gives triumphalists great hope. They benefit from liberal democracy, and want its reign to go on and on.

The politics of crisis talk 

Approaches to the crisis debate are driven by hope and fear. They seek to marshal facts within competing worldviews. That doesn’t mean they’re being duplicitous or biased. All social research is conducted within frameworks of understanding. The danger is that those frameworks are hidden or ignored to the point at which it seems as though it’s just a matter of finding the right facts.

In other words, configuring the debate around a Yes/No axis obscures at the same time as it reveals. It needn’t be, likely never will be, the case that democracy is in crisis, yes or no.  There are crisis tendencies, and forces of stability. That doesn’t mean that any answer to questions about the state of democracy today is as good as any other. There are stronger and weaker accounts of reality. In fact, by recognizing the absence of one of the most significant aspects of our existence today – namely, the terrifying pace and threat of climate change – it becomes easier to see what I mean when I say that the crisis-of-democracy debate is partial, and motivated by concerns other than what is truly the greatest threat to democracy. 

If the crisis-of-democracy debate were really about whether rule by the people can be sustained into the foreseeable future, the consequences of the climate crisis would be central to the discussion. What will four degrees of warming mean for democracy? If the changes about to happen are anything like the world described in David Wallace-Wells’ “Uninhabitable Earth,” democracy will face challenges and require changes unlike anything we’ve seen before. Climate catastrophe could be mere decades away. And it’s simply not part of the democracy-in-crisis debate as played out in the main books and articles of the last five years. That tells us that whatever the debate is about, it’s not strictly about an objective assessment of all available relevant data.

We’re going to hear a lot more about the crisis of democracy in the coming years. As you decide which facts are most persuasive, and ponder what qualifies as a crisis, listen also for what’s driving the contribution. Is it fear of change or hopes for social transformation? What is it about the status quo that those who fear crisis want to preserve? For those happy to find evidence of crisis intensifying in every news cycle, what future do they hope to see? And what’s the relationship between political observers’ fears, hopes, and interpretation of facts? 

Paradoxically, representing the current conjuncture as a crisis of democracy may have a stabilizing effect on the system. Liberal catastrophists kick and scream about “norm erosion,” the collapse of civil discourse and bipartisanship, the loss of national traditions. If they’re proven “wrong” about where all this is leading, all the better for them. They want to be wrong. Claiming that we’re in crisis is a demand to recommit to the basis of the social order. 

Yet revolutionary optimists who trumpet the crisis narrative may also forestall the development of a more acute crisis situation – one they themselves desire. Acting as though the crisis is here, we’re in it now, tends to direct thinking and resources away from the sorts of political theorizing and organizing necessary to unstick the deeply stuck mass orientation toward capitalist democracy as the only legitimate form of politics.

James Cairns is associate professor of Social and Environmental Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Senior Editor at Hamilton Review of Books. He is the co-author (with Alan Sears) of The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century (University of Toronto Press, 2012). His most recent book is The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (University of Toronto Press, 2017).