The Demons of Liberal Democracy

Adrian Pabst

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509528486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Liberals blame the global retreat of liberal democracy on globalisation and authoritarian leaders. Only liberalism, so they assume, can defend democratic rule against multinationals or populists at home and abroad. In this provocative book, Adrian Pabst contends that liberal democracy is illiberal and undemocratic – intolerant about the values of ordinary people while concentrating power and wealth in the hands of unaccountable elites.

Under the influence of contemporary liberalism, democracy is sliding into oligarchy, demagogy and anarchy. Liberals, far from defending open markets and free speech, promote monopolies such as the new tech giants that undermine competition and democratic debate. Liberal individualism has eroded the social bonds and civic duties on which democracy depends for trust and cooperation. To banish liberal democracy's demons, Pabst proposes radical ideas for economic democracy, a politics of persuasion and a better balance of personal freedom with social solidarity.

This book's defence of democratic politics against both liberals and populists will speak to all readers trying to understand our age of upheaval.

1
Democracy between Liberalism and Populism

1 The retreat of (liberal) democracy

Democracy is in retreat. After spreading from the 1970s onwards, the last decade or so has seen democratic setbacks around the world. Various indices, such as Freedom House’s annual report and The Economist’s Democracy Index, suggest that countries that saw a decline in democracy outnumbered those that registered gains for twelve consecutive years.¹ New democracies that in the 1990s and early 2000s seemed promising success stories – including Turkey and Venezuela – are sliding into elective dictatorships. Meanwhile old democracies are flawed even as their governments and media often lecture others on the dangers of rolling back democratic norms, as in the case of EU measures (supported by Germany and France) to censure Poland and Hungary.

Barely a quarter of a century after the ‘end of history’, the prospect of a global convergence towards Western liberal market democracy seems remote. Instead, the discourse has shifted to notions of ‘democratic recession’, which is reinforced by the argument that the loss of belief in democracy among especially younger citizens in the West is evidence of a ‘democratic disconnect’ and the ‘deconsolidation of democracy’.² However, long-term studies of social attitudes towards democratic systems of governments, such as the World Values Survey, suggest that popular support for democracy is growing stronger, not weaker, and that the moral values on which younger people base their democratic beliefs have turned significantly more liberal over time.³ Although both the empirical evidence and the underlying theoretical premises remain a matter of fierce debate, there is little doubt that the expectation in 1989 – democracy deepens where it already exists and spreads to countries where it was previously suppressed – has not come to pass.

The post-Cold War order is unravelling and with it the supposed triumph of liberal democracy over all other political models. Instead, one-party state capitalism is rivalling multi-party market capitalism, as Beijing promotes ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, which is in reality a fusion of communist politics with neo-liberal economics that is faithful to the Leninist promise to replace ‘the government of people’ with ‘the administration of things’. This is part of a wider trend away from democratisation towards an authoritarian consolidation of power by ruling parties and strongmen in countries as varied as Russia, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines and, to some extent, India and Japan – all of which are closely integrated with the world economy. But the old assumption that economic liberalisation and a growing middle class would usher in political freedom and a peaceful transition to democratic pluralism no longer holds either. Outside the liberal West, it seems that the middle class favours state provision of public goods over market competition and national leadership over democratic participation. This ‘new understanding of the middle class calls into question predictions that powerful authoritarian states like China will eventually democratise.’⁴

Moreover, non-Western countries reject Western liberal democracy because it seems to be associated with political weakness, economic instability and social division. Liberal forms of representative government are breaking down under the weight of a dysfunctional party system and the power of special interests, as multinational corporations capture states and limit their ability to provide public services. Growing interdependence has exacerbated the volatility of economies that are increasingly dominated by financialised capitalism. Mass migration, weak demographic growth and multiculturalism have eroded civic bonds and left Western societies more atomised. Taken together, these factors undermine the legitimacy of Western democratic rule in the eyes of the non-West and cast doubt over who composes and controls the supposedly sovereign demos.

The worldwide revolt against liberal democracy is also engulfing the West, as illustrated by the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, the strong support for the Front National (now renamed as Rassemblement National), the AfD’s presence in the German parliament, Italy’s majority vote for anti-establishment parties, and the rise of far-left and far-right forces elsewhere in Europe. Popular support for this political insurgency marks a repudiation of the liberal idea of global progress towards peace and prosperity.⁵ Gone is the post-war promise of progress for every generation. According to a study by the Pew Research Center in December 2015, the American middle class, once the largest class and the very embodiment of the ‘American Dream’, is the majority no longer. The USA is increasingly divided along both socio-economic and cultural class lines, with the middle being hollowed out. Growing numbers slide into poverty and precariousness, while the top 20 per cent monopolise access to good-quality education, housing, health care and jobs.⁶

Falling levels of social mobility extend to Britain, where the government’s social mobility commission found in its last two reports on the annual ‘state of the nation’ that the millennials are the first cohort since 1945 to start their career on lower incomes than their parents and that downward mobility has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. In France and Germany, market fundamentalism is less rampant, but their respective political systems struggle to address the economic and cultural insecurity of a majority.⁷ Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel’s defence of liberal democracy against its adversaries cannot mask the growing gap between political parties and the people they purport to represent – including new ones such as La République en Marche that pretend to reconnect civil society to politics in a spirit of direct democracy but, so far, are little more than top-down orchestrations to propel their leaders into power and maintain a personality cult.

Linked to this is the problem of ‘double delegation’, whereby representatives elected by citizens delegate power to unelected officials who are part of a professional political class.⁸ A governing elite that is seen as out of touch breeds disillusionment and cynicism among voters who are increasingly disengaged, leaving a void that is filled by the contest between the establishment and anti-elite insurgents, which further amplifies the sense of popular alienation. Contemporary liberal democracy is caught in a downward spiral that undermines its claim to legitimate rule – decisive leadership that learns the lessons of past mistakes, combined with popular consent for elected representatives and their decisions. The tendency to muddle through and repeat the error of not tackling widespread concerns about economic justice or social solidarity means that the liberal democratic system of government faces a lack of legitimacy. If the liberal system has endured and seems resilient, it is to do with liberalism’s fusion of the power of coercion with the power of dissuasion – dissent is tolerated insofar as it is directed at the enemies of liberalism who are portrayed as illegitimate. Their criticism is dismissed as reactionary and therefore invalid, which reveals the illiberal core of contemporary liberals.

2 Conceptualising the crisis

Three kinds of response to the retreat of liberal democracy can be distinguished. The first is to blame authoritarian populists at home and abroad who are apparently intent on subverting open societies, democratic government and Western ways of life. The assertion is that a new Populist International led by Moscow thinks of itself as a revolutionary vanguard that hates the liberal West and seeks to destroy democratic institutions in the name of defending the true Western civilisation against the supposedly existential threat of ‘Islamisation’.⁹ The second response is to suggest that the problem with liberal democracy is not its values but its failure to deliver on its promise of freedom, openness and equality. Only liberal democratic government, so the argument goes, can secure well-being, stability, peace, fundamental rights and liberties.¹⁰ Both responses call on the defenders of liberal democracy to stop being complacent and to engage once more in the global battle of ideas.

The third response differs insofar as it focuses on the foundations of liberal democracy in a way that the other two do not. From this perspective, the current crisis is not new but an intensification of some long-standing developments that have led to a mutation of democratic rule. This has been conceptualised in terms of ‘postdemocracy’, ‘the specter of inverted totalitarianism’ and the ‘hollowing out’ of democratic politics.¹¹ Connecting these concepts is the idea that the post-war period of democratisation has given way to a concentration of power in the hands of small groups that are unrepresentative and unaccountable, as exemplified by the nexus between global firms and national governments, which changes the very nature of democracy. And when elected demagogues such as Silvio Berlusconi or Donald Trump begin to subvert democratic institutions, democracies can disappear even as formal procedures remain in place.¹² Therefore the task of renewing democracy goes much further than confronting external threats or fixing domestic policy.

In what follows, my argument is that post-democracy and cognate concepts do not capture a more fundamental pattern – the inherent tendency of liberal democracy to descend into oligarchy, demagogy and anarchy: first of all, the rise of a new oligarchical class that wields power over parliament and the people; second, the resurgence of demagogic politics linked to the manipulation of public debate by ruling elites and insurgents – for example, supposedly enlightened elites armed with technocratic facts versus apparently fake news peddled by those defending the ‘will of the people’; and, third, the emergence of anarchic society connected with the fragmentation of everyday life and a weakening of civic bonds. In consequence, liberal democracy risks...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Liberal Democracy in Question
• 1 Democracy between Liberalism and Populism
• 2 Oligarchy – Commodification and Economic Democracy
• 3 Demagogy – Sophistry and the Politics of Truth
• 4 Anarchy – Atomisation and the Primacy of Association
• 5 Tyranny – Voluntary Servitude and Humanism
• Conclusion – Renewing the Democratic Promise
• Index
• End User License Agreement