What ails democratic politics?

Rethinking Democracy  

Edited by Andrew Gamble and 

Tony Wright

Wiley, Rs 14.99, 172 pages

There was a time when western political pundits were obsessed with the idea of the imminent death of communism, and for many it became a full-time occupation to write its obituary. And when the “God” eventually did die, we were told the future henceforth belonged to western-style liberal democracy. 

Remember Francis Fukuyama’s triumphal prediction that the collapse of Soviet communism was “not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such... the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” ?

Fast forward, and as American academic Alan Wolfe noted in a recent article, Mr Fukuyama’s thesis “appears to have been written for another planet”. 

“Far from avowing the triumph of liberal democracy, in 2019 many believe we will be lucky to hold on to the dwindling number of liberal democracies we have,” he wrote in The New Republic, echoing growing fears over the future of liberal democracy as the democratic world appears to drown in a tide of populism from America to Europe and Asia, including India.

Mr Fukuyama himself has readjusted his rose-tinted vision of democracy, claiming that his end-of-history thesis was “more of a question than an assertion”. His original essay apparently had a question mark in the title that was dropped when it was published as a book. 

The book under review — a collection of essays by 11 prominent academics — leaves no room for ambiguity as to where it stands vis-a-vis the state of Western liberal democracy. The political system is facing an existential crisis, and there appears to be no obvious way out of it short of rethinking the very idea of democracy as it is conventionally understood.

“It faces challenges it seems unable to meet while authoritarian nationalists and assorted populists trade on its difficulties,” write its editors Andrew Gamble of Cambridge University and Tony Wright, a former Labour MP and currently professor at University College, London.

This is a common thread that runs through the book, and though contributors come to it from different angles, the underlying consensus is that much of the world has fallen out of love with liberal democracy — a casualty of a “politics of resentment” fuelled by democracy’s perceived failure to deliver for the people. More importantly, they acknowledge liberals’ own role in sowing the seeds of the present crisis with their complacency and sense of entitlement.

Colin Crouch of Warwick University even suggests that the rise of “populism” may prove a blessing in disguise as it “may well invigorate ...democracy, bringing neglected issues to the table and putting established parties and elites on their mettle”. David Runciman of Cambridge University and author of How Democracy Ends writes that it has brought home to the “political elites” the message that they “cannot take their superior knowledge, or their power, for granted”. Another unintended consequence has been to make people engage more actively with politics.

But the book’s main argument is that 100 years after the fundamental principle of universal suffrage was recognised, laying the foundations of representative democracy, it’s a good time for “stock-taking and rethinking” as it comes under attack from a “populist surge” symbolised by the rise of self-proclaimed illiberal leaders claiming democratic mandate. The phenomenon represented by Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Brexit has raised profound questions about the “condition and conduct of representative politics”.

“Has democracy delivered what those who fought so hard to establish it hoped for? How far is it an unfinished revolution?”  the book asks and examines them from different angles. 

It doesn’t pretend to offer neat solutions but warns against complacency on the one hand — the view that the current difficulties are merely a passing phase — and fatalism on the other — that democracy is dead for good. 

Democracy, it argues, is “not a finished state” but a “living process” that requires an enduring faith in its values. When there is no longer the popular will or belief in its values it may wither away. Worryingly, however, that has already started to happen with popular trust in liberal values at an all-time low. A new poll by BritainThinks, a leading think-tank, reveals what it describes as “an astonishing lack of faith in the political system” among British voters with fewer than six per cent saying they think politicians understand them.  As many as 75 per cent said that UK politics was “broken” and not fit for purpose. According to analysts, the mood has never been “more despairing”.  And that can be said of the prevailing mood in most democracies around the world. 

Rethinking Democracy is the latest addition to the growing literature on the future of democracy, and though it may not have anything terribly original to say, its value lies in bringing together the various strands of  the debate in one place and helping lay readers make sense of a complex crisis.