Around 380 B.C. Plato in his phenomenal work The Republic, discussed five types of political regimes which he thought that they progressively degenerate from one to the another: Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny. The society and the state in the first four regimes are principally driven and ruled on the ground of wisdom & reason (by an aristocratic man), war, honor & state-power (by a timocratic ruler/group), capital & corporate (an oligarchic group) or freedom & rule-of-law (a democratic leader chosen by the people) respectively. According to Plato, through this evolutionary pattern in polity, democracy transform into tyranny when an autocratic, separatist, dictatorial, populist leader come into power, which can be phrased as an autoimmune disease of a democratic organism and this leads the society to an almost-lawless, chaotic state. Political ideologies die at this stage, mediocrity emerges and finally all these lead the tyrant to it’s self-imprisonment; the state to an anarchy and thus the cycle of political regimes continue.
Now, how apposite is this story of inevitable fate of democracy in our post-Trump, post-Brexit world? If Trump is a face of a tyrant then his emergence is not an exceptional phenomenon according to Plato’s conception of political regimes; rather quite predictive. So, in the 21st century capital driven world of free markets & globalization what’s the future of western democracy? Can our beloved democracy save itself in the age of global ascendance of autocracy and conservatism? Or is it that it will eventually be sold to few oligarchic corporate bodies who globally will have control over the flow of capital and also over individuals’ lives in the free sociopolitical marketplace?
If we look back, not too far ago during cold-war, soviet union and it’s communist ideology was an external existential threat [3] to democratic power like U.S. Now, as time passed since the post-cold war era, capital started speaking and it became the ruler and indirect policy maker in almost all influential domains of society, starting from weapon manufacturing to education. Leftist’s and Rightist’s political ideologies slowly converged and their goals and demands all turned into a sort of common language of tax-cuts, unemployment, health, banking etc etc. In a number of liberal democratic countries which are mostly driven by the market force, citizens have been electing one party over the other not because of their strong moral support to their ideologies, rather more to see a change in the political face and color. Now, is it an indication of the “tiredness of democracy” or “democracy fatigue” ? Does the democratic tiredness syndrome eventually lead to extremism?
Younger democracy runs on an innate disease of external ideological threats which necessarily (but not sufficiently) resist it from being run on an autopilot mode.
In the long run, in an aging democracy, the autopilot mode degenerates into democratic tiredness syndrome which eventually results in emergence of extremist, tyrannic and autocratic leaders. This can be termed as an autoimmune disease.
To better understand the evolution of this political organism called democracy and how philosophical and ideological positions of the political parties have changed their shape and form over the time while coexisting within this organism, let’s have a look at the David Nolan’s (1969) 2-dimensional political spectrum diagram below:
As it’s evident from the chart, liberalism‘s philosophy for example has been to increase governmental control in the economy and to reduce government control over personal behavior and thus to give more personal freedom to the citizens. Over the time the positions of Democratic, Republican and Libertarian Parties in this chart have moved quite a lot [1] but as a matter of fact, practice of liberal democracy has been quite successful until now that it faces a number of external and internal threats again, e.g., China’s “benevolent autocracy”, emergence of a tyrannical mediocre majority inclining towards conservative separatist mentality, rise of nationalist parties in EU countries like France etc. etc. The immediate impacts of these uprising threats are evident in global trade policies; in Trump’s America for example. At the pinnacle of global economy and exchange; in 2016 world has witnessed Brexit, arguably another major failure of western democracy.
So, is this political dynamics following a pattern as thought by Plato? Let’s recapitulate the cardinal philosophical and moral grounds of democracy which have been (mis)used by the opportunistic leaders time after time, tactfully while we were apparently dizzy from democratic tiredness syndrome. Democracy is a governmental rule by the people (republicanism & popular sovereignty: majority rules, minority rights) with liberty and rights to the individuals in a federal (division of political power between national and state governments) & constitutional (rule of law) framework. So, in principle a democratically elected government can do anything it wants as long as 50.01% of people vote for it. Now, this along with principle of equality (that everyone has equal voting right) means, it doesn’t matter who belongs to that 50.01% of the society: politically non-experts or intellectual aristocrats. Besides, democracy in principle doesn’t put any constraint in the ascendance on populism as well. So, geared with these pathological benefits, leaders have been gaining their popularity by persuading people through their campaigns, speech, fake promises and ultimately winning in the election by means of popularity. Thus democracy never ensures the best suitable candidate to come to power via electoral process, rather it ensures the position of the most popular one.
Now, philosophy and practice of liberal democracy which was extrapolated from economics, of having a self-sustained, self-managing, political free market where the rules of engagements are imposed along with the empowerment of the citizens of the state and the state is “led by the invisible hand” as a “living & breathing political organism” ultimately maximizing welfare: also saw it’s failure as the condition of self-sustainability was compromised both by internal and external malignant diseases. As Chomsky puts it [7],
Social democracy, not just its European variant but others as well, has been under severe attack through the neoliberal period of the past generation, which has been harmful to the generation population almost everywhere while benefiting tiny elites.
Carefully scrutinizing the post-cold war geo-politics, on one hand we have witnessed the suicidal strategies of the democratic leaders such as; political intervention in other countries, going for war against dictatorial governments and then messing up the whole geo-political & geo-economic scene and afterwards showing abandonment as a sign of incompetence: examples start from Afghanistan, Vietnam to Iraq. Besides many other problems, all these created huge immigration issues from middle-east, north-Africa to EU and the image of the West that has ultimately been projected to the Rest is that “it underestimates the religion of Islam” [2]. On the other hand we have seen what arrogant, interventionist leaders, policy makers, diplomats of the western democracies were blinded to, the outbreak of economic power in China, India and south Asian countries. Not to mention they also remained deaf to all the advises coming from UN general assembly and other International Organizations during all these “strategic errors”.
Now, is it a malignant syndrome of democratic power that produced such interventionist western hubris leaders and ultimately proving democracy as a suicidal system of government? Kishore Mahbubani suggests that western leaders now need to follow a strategy of 3-M’s before it’s too late: Minimalist (minimum intervention), Multilateral & Machiavellian which can possibly lead to a new order in geopolitics via economic integration and collaboration. In words of Mahubani [2]:
However the West is wrong in believing that democracy is a necessary condition for economic success. If it were, China could not and should not have succeeded. But it has. This is also why many in the West deeply resent China’s success. It undermines many key pillars of Western ideology.
Historically and philosophically speaking, ideological multifurcation in political schools of thought have their roots in ethical & metaphysical structures. For example, the foundation of a political institution is defined by it’s very core ethical questions of happiness, liberty, equality & justice [5] and metaphysically by the appropriate unit under study: a collectivist or holistic approach vs an individualistic one. History has shown us that all the different political doctrines are necessary depending on the demand of time but none of them are sufficient by itself to maintain a persistent societal order. Due to power dynamics & historical demand one ideology irreversibly emerge from the other. In this light, democracy can’t claim itself to be the best working political organism in history. With time through the interplay with the capitalistic notions, political philosophies have also been intertwined and have converged towards a more common hybrid ground. So, what awaits next?
Since the individual corporate bodies, economic regions (e.g. EU) and countries (e.g. China, India) have started becoming powerful, if the populist & separatist democratic leaders continue existing in power, it’s gonna be suicidal for the fate of western democracies. At relatively younger age of democracy, external political ideological threats were necessary evils for it’s survival. This we called as an innate disease. But as we see now, for a relatively aging democracy like U.S. (for example); with it’s citizens suffering from democratic tiredness syndrome won’t be able to survive these uprising external threats (mostly economic) [6] until it cures it’s own autoimmune disease of generating hubris tyrannic leaders and stops it’s suicidal policies of self-imprisonment, but rather take a multilateral, collaborative outlook; keeping in view more sustainable goals for the long run, through compromising (if needed) immediate business profits for now.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like to thank Hugo Borst for sharing his views with me on variety of topics in politics over numerous late-night conversations which most definitely have significant impacts on my perspectives and thus in the content of this weblog too.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READINGS:
- Carl Milsted Jr. (2017), Business Plan for a New Political Party. Kindle Edition
- Kishore Mahbubani (2018), Has the West Lost It? A Provocation. Penguin
- Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky (2018), How Democracies Die, Penguin Random House
- John Andrews (2017), The World in Conflict: Understanding the World’s Trouble spots, Profile Books Ltd.
- Alex Tuckness and Clark Wolf (2017), This is Political Philosophy: An Introduction, Wiley Blackwell
- Noam Chomsky (2017), Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, Penguin
- Noam Chomsky (2017), Optimism over Despair, Penguin
Disclaimer: This is a personal weblog and it’s not a peer-reviewed article, rather more of an opinion piece in the light of reviewing the books referred. Which means that the ideas and thoughts expressed here are entirely from my perspective and I have the sole responsibility for the content and they are not intended to harm or disrespect any particular authority or any individual.
Saikat Chatterjee 