The euphoria we felt was a case of what Ernst Bloch called “the darkness of the lived moment”.
Democracy may have been the desire of the day, but nearly half a century on, Europeans find themselves turning to fascism again.
Enter Francis Fukuyama, whose Pollyanna-ish 1990s forecasts about the coming hegemony of liberal democracy failed to come true.
Instead, we got backsliding from democratic norms.
Those “norms” were often more observed in the breach even in their halcyon days, the decades since the end of actually existing socialism.
More troubling, liberal democracy, where it did exist, was all too often predicated on brutality and coercion elsewhere.
The relatively peaceable relations between capital and labour in the most industrially advanced regions were achieved mainly by displacing surplus exploitation and physical repression to the global south.
For the liberal capitalist cognoscenti, the hope persisted that democratic political norms, such as those that existed among front-rank liberal democracies, would be a model for future emulation.
That it did not could be blamed on the weakness of local elites, the influence of outside agitators, or any other of the thousand natural shocks that humanity is heir to.
When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. claimed in 1965 that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” this seemed more than slightly optimistic.
Oh, how times have changed. The arc of the moral universe is nowhere to be seen, and journalists and social scientists have given up on justice.
Now, things are discussed in terms of post-democracy, directed democracy, illiberal democracy, and (increasingly in the last few years) democratic regression.
This last term is particularly indicative because democratic regression suggests a return to a politics once firmly relegated to the rubbish heap of history.
One of the best recent exemplars of the growing literature on this topic is Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn’s The Democratic Regression: The Political Causes of Authoritarian Populism.
Originally published in German in 2021, Schäfer and Zürn’s book aims to provide an unequivocal statement of the causes of this regression. That it does, although as is so often the case in this literature, the book shows how intractable the situation is.
Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn equate the rise of right-wing populism with democratic regression and claim that two common but ultimately unsatisfactory explanatory strategies—socioeconomic and socio-cultural—are in common use.
In the case of the former, dissatisfaction with liberal democracy is linked to the animosity of losers in processes of globalisation against a system that they believe screwed them.
There are plenty of these. However, explanations based on such arguments often have difficulty explaining why voters still turn to one-percenter politicians like Doland Trump and Silvio Berlusconi, whose solutions don’t address the economic distress that globalisation has caused.
Sociocultural explanations argue that anti-democratic sentiment results from the tendency of liberal democratic societies to overreach in extending political and social rights to racial minorities, LGBTQ+ communities, and those outside the white Christian patriarchy.
Schäfer and Zürn concede that these reactions are not without influence but point out that authoritarian populism is as strong in illiberal countries such as Russia and Turkey as in France and Italy.
The reason why is that liberal democracies aren’t fully democratic. According to Schäfer and Zürn:
Our thesis is that only the politically selective handling of these social changes provokes a populistic defense reaction. A genuinely political explanation of populism sets out from liberal democracy’s real deficits in the sphere of representation. Not all social groups are equally well represented, and the interests of the resource-rich receive more than their fair share of attention. Those who want to explain populism cannot close their eyes to the weaknesses of democracy.
This is not a new idea. However, Schäfer and Zürn provide a wealth of recent statistical and factual evidence to support their particular take on this claim.
The issue of democratic deficits has long dogged the European Union’s political and administrative systems, and not without cause.
However, there is also a point in which Robert Michel’s iron law of oligarchies comes into play: the larger an organisation is, the smaller the proportion of its members that can have an effective role in decision-making.
The dilution of the political and social power of ethnocultural elites in Europe and North America has led to a zero-sum calculation among members of dominant groups at lower income levels, that the rising power of non-whites/women/LGBTQ+ represents a diminution of their own position.
Not surprisingly, Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn offer a range of technocratic solutions that liberal political scientists might be expected to promote.
These include enhancing the responsiveness of democratic institutions, correcting structural deficiencies by pushing effective decision-making into lower levels of governmental and administrative hierarchies, and improving feedback and other communication mechanisms.
All of these points are well taken. But none seem likely to gain much traction against the rising wave of far-right populism. It is characteristic of mainstream political science to view political belief and action as influenced by a rational assessment of one’s circumstances.
There may have been some point when that reflected actual conditions. Still, a wealth of evidence indicates that politics in much of the world is enmeshed in symbolic narratives that are unconnected (or only tangentially connected) to immediate material conditions.
This is not to say that a more responsive government wouldn’t be welcome or that it could pay dividends in terms of increased engagement and promoting more positive inclinations toward public institutions.
However, for people whose understanding of the everyday facts of life is divorced from reality, it’s hard to imagine that better representation in public institutions would do much to improve matters.
Of greater concern is the loss of legitimacy at the systemic level. This is a slightly different issue than dissatisfaction with government responsiveness.
The value of democratic pluralism was a fundamental presumption of the public sphere in the industrialised world for the better part of a century.
The last decades have seen a resurgence in political programs seeking to limit democracy or abolish it altogether.
Liberal capitalism, especially as shaped by its neoliberal variant, is running out of steam. It no longer has the capacity to generate rates of growth that can keep up with population growth.
Reliance on risk-laden, speculative, and often opaque financial projects creates the ever-present likelihood of the need for bailouts like those in the wake of the post-2008 crises.
These retain the capacity to exacerbate the legitimation problems of the contemporary system.
Put simply, the problem is not so much the systemic deficiencies that have caused people to be dissatisfied with democracy.
Rather, in the current media environment, this dissatisfaction has become entwined with the view that the government is run by the Elders of Zion.
Action is needed to solve this problem. But it’s debatable whether the Western political class can make it happen.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
