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The End of Democracy?
This paper in The Journal of Democracy about the loss of confidence in democracy in the West is extraordinary and horrifying. (h/t First Things.) The authors examined data from the World Values Survey dating back to 1995. What they found startled them:
Three decades ago, most scholars simply assumed that the Soviet Union would remain stable. This assumption was suddenly proven false. Today, we have even greater confidence in the durability of the world’s affluent, consolidated democracies. But do we have good grounds for our democratic self-confidence? At first sight, there would seem to be some reason for concern. …
…. we look at four important types of measures that are clear indicators of regime legitimacy as opposed to government legitimacy: citizens’ express support for the system as a whole; the degree to which they support key institutions of liberal democracy, such as civil rights; their willingness to advance their political causes within the existing political system; and their openness to authoritarian alternatives such as military rule. What we find is deeply concerning. Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders. Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives. The crisis of democratic legitimacy extends across a much wider set of indicators than previously appreciated.
Among the findings:
Among older generations, the devotion to democracy is about as fervent and widespread as one might expect: In the United States, for example, people born during the interwar period consider democratic governance an almost sacred value. When asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how “essential” it is for them “to live in a democracy,” 72 percent of those born before World War II check “10,” the highest value. So do 55 percent of the same cohort in the Netherlands. But, as Figure 1 shows, the millennial generation has grown much more indifferent. Only one in three Dutch millennials accords maximal importance to living in a democracy; in the United States, that number is slightly lower, around 30 percent.
One of the most surprising findings is that young, upper-income Americans are the cohort least committed to democracy: 35 percent of upper-income young Americans now think it would be a “good” thing for the army to take over. (In 1995, only one in sixteen respondents agreed.)
Only 32 percent of millennials agree that it’s “absolutely essential” that “civil rights protect people’s liberty.” Some 26 percent of them think it’s “unimportant” in a democracy for people to “choose their leaders in free elections.” And 24 percent consider democracy to be a “bad” or “very bad” way of running the country.
“Strikingly,” the authors note, “such undemocratic sentiments have risen especially quickly among the wealthy.”
In 1995, the “rich” (defined as deciles 8 to 10 on a ten-point income scale) were the most opposed to undemocratic viewpoints, such as the suggestion that their country would be better off if the “army” ruled. Lower-income respondents (defined as deciles 1 to 5) were most in favor of such a proposition. Since then, relative support for undemocratic institutions has reversed. In almost every region, the rich are now more likely than the poor to express approval for “having the army rule.” In the United States, for example, only 5 percent of upper-income citizens thought that army rule was a “good” or “very good” idea in the mid-1990s. That figure has since risen to 16 percent. By way of comparison, in Latin America in the mid-1990s, a decade after the return to civilian rule, 21 percent of upper-income respondents still supported military rule. That figure now stands at 33 percent.
The idea that support for military rule has markedly increased among wealthy citizens of long-established liberal democracies is so counterintuitive that it naturally invites skepticism. Yet it is consistent with similar survey items that measure citizens’ openness to other authoritarian alternatives. In the United States, among all age cohorts, the share of citizens who believe that it would be better to have a “strong leader” who does not have to “bother with parliament and elections” has also risen over time: In 1995, 24 percent of respondents held this view; by 2011, that figure had increased to 32 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of citizens who approve of “having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country” has grown from 36 to 49 percent.
Antidemocratic sentiment has also risen dramatically in Europe, although not as sharply as in the United States:
Nor is the United States an outlier among mature democracies. In Europe in 1995, 6 percent of high-income earners born since 1970 favored the possibility of “army rule”; today, 17 percent of young upper-income Europeans favor it. This is a striking finding: Rising support for illiberal politics is driven not only by the disempowered, middle-aged, and underemployed. Its vocal supporters can also be found among the young, wealthy, and privileged.
Having begun by alluding to the world’s astonishment at the sudden collapse of communism, the authors conclude with a warning:
In a world where most citizens fervently support democracy, where antisystem parties are marginal or nonexistent, and where major political forces respect the rules of the political game, democratic breakdown is extremely unlikely. It is no longer certain, however, that this is the world we live in. …
If political scientists are to avoid being blindsided by the demise of established democracies in the coming decades, as they were by the fall of communism a few decades ago, they need to find out whether democratic deconsolidation is happening; to explain the possible causes of this development; to delineate its likely consequences (present and future); and to ponder the potential remedies.
These are sinister developments. Sometimes I can coax myself into denial about the gravity of the crisis in the West, telling myself that these are the normal ups and downs of liberal democracies. But confronted with data like this, I can’t, really.
In response to this paper, one of my Twitter followers sent me a link to a 1997 essay by Robert Kaplan that I’d never read, although apparently it’s quite well known, titled Was Democracy Just a Moment? You may have read it at the time. It’s strikingly prescient:
Democratic governance, at the federal, state, and local levels, goes on. But its ability to affect our lives is limited. The growing piles of our material possessions make personal life more complex and leave less time for communal matters. And as communities become liberated from geography, as well as more specialized culturally and electronically, they will increasingly fall outside the realm of traditional governance. Democracy loses meaning if both rulers and ruled cease to be part of a community tied to a specific territory. In this historical transition phase, lasting perhaps a century or more, in which globalization has begun but is not complete and loyalties are highly confused, civil society will be harder to maintain. How and when we vote during the next hundred years may be a minor detail for historians.
I’m also struck that even an essay from 1997 — not exactly ancient history — is more demanding of the reader than most contemporary writing, and makes assumptions about the general reader’s familiarity with history and current events that it would no longer be safe to make. We seem not only to be experiencing democratic but intellectual deconsolidation. It’s a worrying combination.
Thoughts?
Published in General
I am there!
And then the GOP can stop telling me they are doing everything they can. They need to get radical
Trivia: That was Jonah’s first published op-ed, in the Wall Street Journal. And oddly enough, when I heard that some years later, I could actually remember reading the original piece at the time.
November and December 2016, January 2017.
By February 1, we will all be Kulaks.
The fatal error in the thinking of people who are ready to dismiss democracy is that their vision of the proper (authoritarian) government would be the one in control. This is true whether the people doing the envisioning are of the Right or the Left.
I thought this article was supposed to be about Russia, not life under Obama and HRC.
One of the scariest things I’ve read lately, and that’s saying something.
I recently put up a related post: The Seven Threat Vectors Against Free Speech
Democracy is not the best form of government. The best form of government is the benevolent czar. The problem is that the worst form of government is the malevolent czar.
I’m all in favor of dictatorship — so long as I get to be the dictator.
One reason the rich might prefer a military dictatorship is safety. The “rich” are demonized so thoroughly that they fear for their own well-being. A dictator is certainly going to be safer than a street mod looting and burning. (See: Baltimore, Ferguson, Milwaukee.)
“Resolved, that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”
— Oxford Union, 1933, passed 275-153.
This was never easy. It’s not easy now. It’s not going to get any easier any time soon.
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin had the support of maybe 33%. And that was when the sun was shining.
Suck it up. Walk it off. Rub some dirt on it.
Me too.
I mean, if I am. Though, I imagine that I could be OK with running the show.
Please remember, though, I supported you here!
An example of the truth of this can be seen in the UK. All major parties wanted to stay in the EU but when given a referendum the citizens voted for independence.
The problem with democracy (as with all other forms of government) can be seen in the Bill of Rights. Whatever form of government the idea is to let you achieve and enjoy what you can. So the basic problem is in your expectation of government. We all come into life with the philosophy of a dictator. We then move with our life experience variously to other forms of government based on our assessment of what best works for us given that we cannot order life completely to our own terms.
The demographic breakdown in the survey reflects the differential life experiences of the participants and what they observed about government at critical points in their lives. Since no form of government is either perfect or perfectible a flirtation with any form of government is understandable. The only safeguard is history.
Arguments about what is good for “most” people may be hollow for the real or perceived losses I experience. So even history has a only weak hold on the levers of society. Our Founders sought for us a system that balanced all of these forces to provide us the best shot at liberty. That we have nearly lost our Constitution simply demonstrates what a hard task good government really is.