Can democracy survive in the West?

In Alison Smith’s wonderful novel Autumn, written just after Brexit, there is a conversation between mother and daughter about why Mum has stopped following the news:

I am tired of the news. I am tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling. I am tired of the vitriol. I am tired of the anger. I am tired of the meanness. I am tired of the selfishness. I am tired of how we’re doing nothing to stop it.

Right or wrong, the sentiment is interesting because it reveals that people are turning off from the important connection with society that comes via the media. And of course we know that this sort of reaction took a majority of the British down the Brexit road. Yet doing things together with other countries - pooling sovereignty - was precisely the way we have been able to protect Western liberal democracy for the past sixty years.

The Newsletter correspondence started by Chris Duke and Nemeth Balazs on Democracy and the threats that it faces seeks to address the bigger picture and the deeper issues underlying this situation.

An inescapable trilemma

In 2006 Dani Rodrik helped us understand what he called the ‘inescapable trilemma of the world economy’. He claims – in my view rightly - that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are incompatible. You can combine any two of these elements but not have all three at the same time. I guess his view was always the private ‘Davos-man’ view. This has already sacrificed liberal democracy on the high altar of globalized materialism.

What Rodrik shows is that Nation States in the era of globalization face a stark choice. They can pool sovereignty internationally so as to create the conditions to control the global market place. This seems a highly improbable option in a world of Trump, Brexit and rising nationalism. Another option is to retain sovereignty and make global economic integration the top priority, to the exclusion of all other domestic objectives. But that would hardly be democratic. Or you could - as the old OECD countries have done for the past sixty years, give up some measure of economic integration in the interests of sovereignty and democracy. This last option has basically been the western liberal model throughout that time.

But things are changing. First, twenty five years ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the era of Francis Fukuyama’s silly book The End of History we were led to believe in the universal triumph of the western liberal democratic model. Yet it is clear that countries like China have rejected the democratic part of the equation. More recently we have seen the same movement in Turkey; and in different ways others are following the authoritarian model. Russia, Egypt, Venezuela and Hungary are a few examples. The most worrying threat to western style freedom and democracy has come however from within its heartland: Mr. Donald Trump’s United States of America. Whilst he and his European friends have not caused the crisis in democracy we face, they are clear reflections of it. The demise of the middle class, the increased poverty and precariousness of the old working class, the rise and rise of a new underclass, have led to frightening regression of these groups’ hopes and living standards. This has created a backlash of anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, anti-other sentiments which are a hallmark of contemporary politics. Having given up on the politics of redistribution and class fairness in favour of identity politics centred on race, sexual orientation and gender, the liberal elite have given up on attempting to create a fair and just society for all. They have become obsessed by what Mark Lilla calls ‘the pseudo-politics of self-regard’.

Today’s real crisis

So today we find ourselves faced by a real crisis in western style liberal democracy when twenty-five years ago we were led to believe in the end of history. What can we do? The starting point must be to understand the problem as a whole; lest we imagine that the issues we hold dear to our hearts provide a response to the whole. Second we need to address the question of how, in the areas we hold dear to our hearts, we can make a positive impact in reducing and even perhaps mastering the crisis in democracy.

There are three issues which I would like to explore in the coming months, where life learning could clearly play an important role.

How do we educate citizens and future citizens to be vigilant? We need to help our societies tame the new media and their associated instruments of ‘group-think’

How do we impart and reinforce the idea of truth and truthfulness and how they help in questioning power? This takes us into the realm of time and perspective- how do we teach our societies to reason over time? Must the old order always be the reference point? How do you question without destroying? How do we reintroduce the values of contradiction and tolerance at the same time?

What response education?

How should we approach the question of power and regulation?  We live in a world where at all levels we do not respect regulation but try to ‘get away with it’. At the top, the new power elite of Google, Facebook, and Apple simply do not respect regulations but do get away with it. Can education play a role in making our citizens aware of the abuse they suffer every day from these new tyrannies?

Cultural pessimism is rarely a helpful state of mind. But clearly we have reason to be worried. Let’s try to assemble a coherent set of approaches to education and lifelong learning which will contribute to breathing hope back into liberal democracy.

What, please, are your reactions? Please write to [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Source: PIMA Newsletter No 13, August 2017