~ Vaclav Havel
Is not one lesson of history not to take anything for granted?
JAMES MARRIOTT
We shouldn’t expect democracy to last for ever
All political systems decay — perhaps ours is not malfunctioning but is simply growing old, and cracks are showing
Near the beginning of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — that sprawling survey of a thousand years of crisis, decay, tragedy and collapse — the historian Edward Gibbon supplies a few sarcastic observations on the shortcomings of various forms of government.
His comments on democracy are scathing and brief. According to the system of “democratical government” in which sovereignty is handed to that highly unpromising political actor the “unwieldy multitude”, power is “first abused and then lost”. What more is there to say? All political systems are vulnerable to corruption. The most stable way of selecting a ruler, Gibbon suggests, is probably hereditary monarchy.
Few modern readers share this periwigged 18th-century elitist’s distaste for democratic government. But to those of us who cherish democracy, the perspective of an outsider for whom our system was merely one absurd aberration among many is a useful challenge.
The crisis of the democratic West (for which the latest depressing evidence is an Ipsos poll suggesting nearly half of western voters believe democracy is broken) has been endlessly puzzled over. Readers will be familiar with the leading theories: distrust of elites, wealth inequality, immigration, polarisation.
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Doubtless there is truth in all those ideas. Less palatable is the thought that all political systems eventually decay. Why should democracy be an exception? It is a recurring human error to mistake the arbitrary circumstances of the present for indestructible laws of the universe. For believers in medieval kingship, the monarch was divinely appointed and the social hierarchy over which he ruled was eternal, the human portion of the “great chain of being” that ran from God in heaven to the lowliest earthworm. That view of human affairs did not long survive the events of the French Revolution.
While I am not aware of anyone who regards democracy as supernaturally ordained, many in the 21st century have got into the unconscious habit of viewing democratic government as predestined, the end point of centuries of political evolution. This is premature.
Modern democracy is not very old. Louis XVI could look back on 900 years of French kingship by the time he went to the guillotine. In this country, the whole adult population has enjoyed the franchise for less than a century. In the US some progressives date true democracy to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which removed the last obstacles to African American voters. In Switzerland the vote was extended to the female half of the population just over 50 years ago. To a visitor from another time this would seem scant evidence for the idea that there is anything inevitable about our way of doing things.
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We too easily forget that democracy, like any other system of government, is merely the product of historical circumstance. For the duration of its history modern democracy has been able to rely on two obviously remarkable facts: the 200 years of unprecedented economic growth that followed the Industrial Revolution, and an increasingly educated and literate population.
Until recently, rising literacy meant democracies could rely on electorates increasingly capable of making rational decisions based on an accurate picture of the world. And relatively consistent economic growth gave us politicians whose obligatory election-time promises of a wealthier future generally tended to come true. What happens to the quality of democratic decision-making when screen-addicted voters no longer live in the real world? And what happens to faith in the system when a new age of stagnant growth means the endlessly promised better tomorrow can never arrive?
It may be that all political systems contain the seeds of their ultimate decay. The oligarchy of wealthy families that ruled the Republic of Venice gave their city first a golden age but then centuries of sclerosis and decline as the restriction of political and economic privileges to a tiny elite helped destroy the state’s political and commercial dynamism. Autocratic rulers possess the initial advantages of decisive action and centralised leadership. But as Gibbon well knew, even strong leaders lapse into despotism or madness.
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One could assemble a similarly fatalistic account of the progress of democracy. Perhaps what we are seeing in the 21st century is not a political order that is malfunctioning but one that is merely growing old. It may be that the crucial democratic right to criticise power eventually degrades into toxic cynicism, fuelling dangerous public hatred of all leaders and discouraging talented people from entering government. And just as monarchs will always prefer to extract money from their subjects rather than cut back spending on new palaces, it may be that democratic electorates will always prefer to extract money from future generations via perilously expanding debt rather than shouldering unpleasant tax rises in the present.
The tyranny of the majority, democracy’s most widely noticed flaw, may turn out to be more profoundly destabilising than anticipated. When one demographic group becomes electorally preponderant (such as older voters in modern democracies) and allocates itself social and financial privileges, it not only punishes other groups but eventually degrades faith in the system. The young who languish in squalid rented housing are not only politically unlucky but sceptical of the existing order. Democracy may not seem so sacred to those who have been punished by it.
This is not to preach doom. Nothing in history is fated. Rather it is to caution that democracy has not always seemed as obvious or inevitable to outsiders as it does to us. An appreciation of the long view need not inspire pessimism but it should inspire a salutary sense of the extraordinary and precious fragility of the way things are.
One lesson of history is not to take anything for granted.
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- On Bluesky bsky.app/profile/theresthistory.bsky.social
