Small reflection at the start of the ‘super election year’: what if it is not the voters, but the democracy itself? Of course, a re-election of Trump will throw the American rule of law into disarray; of course, a larger radical right bloc in Brussels is also fueling the erosion here. But the idea that democracies were only threatened when authoritarian populists arrived on the scene with their political claw hammers misses something fundamental.
Democratic societies have lost much of their power in recent decades. Due to privatizations, control over public services such as rail and energy shifted to concerns in France or Sweden or was hidden away in privatized companies. Trade agreements limited the space of democracies to shape their own economies. Politicians ‘didn’t care about it anymore’.
But those who noticed were out of luck: the voices and interests of the very rich and of organized capital were heard best on both sides of the Atlantic, showed research. In the meantime, the parties that had formed the bridge between voters and elected officials for decades emptied and, apart from a few hashtags and fleeting action groups, nothing of substance took their place.
By promising hard power where it is lacking, Trump, Wilders, Le Pen and so on respond to voters’ calls for more control. They are therefore both a consequence of the democratic crisis and a continuation; they further hollow out what had already been hollowed out.
After 2016 (Trump, Brexit) the lesson could have been: democratize – and fast a little. More say for citizens over their politics, economy and society. But liberal democracy and demophobia have never been far apart. From the American Founding Fathers who wanted to protect the prosperous minority against the passions of the majority to the early liberals who saw the representative system as a way to shape that exclusion: the liberal state and democracy are not a natural marriage.
There followed mainly a defensive cramp: how could democracies become protected against their challengers? The erosion was not tackled and democratic power was not strengthened. Although the pandemic expanded the boundaries of what is politically possible (think: the support packages), this temporary revival of political power was not followed by major democratization.
So this is what matters now more than ever: how do democracies gain traction? The fact that Democrats barely asked that question, let alone answered it, led to a farce in 2016. If that does not happen now, tragedy will soon threaten.
Mark Lievisse Adriaanse ([email protected]) replaces Stephan Sanders this week