Is democracy dying? Bafflement Essay #5

Everybody wanted action, but Nobody wanted to act. Anon

Photo by SUXSIEQ.

Over the past two years my sense of belonging to a liberal democracy has fallen apart. Until then, I'd basked in a lifelong feeling of security that my ability to amble down a London street breathing God's fresh air was my birthright as a freeborn English woman. (1) And as a child wandering the fields of Gloucestershire, I intuitively knew a truth well understood by indigenous peoples: simply by virtue of being human, I had a right to be on the earth.

Adult life, teaching political philosophy and reporting on policymaking, added layers of words, concepts and processes of reasoning to this lived experience. I learned that preserving the sense of the-right-to-be that came with being alive was part of a struggle against tyranny that had pervaded human history: there had always been those who sought to disrupt the relationship between self and world, whether out of a desire for resources or to exert control. I understood that Western societies had made irreversible progress in this respect, devising a system of governance with inbuilt protections against the all-too-human tendency to dominate others. It was finally understood that power resided with the people and, when handed to leaders, was always done on a conditional, limited and temporary basis. The system that enshrined this, with its constitutions, declarations of rights and separations of powers, was formal and abstract compared to the sacred relationship between human and the life force experienced by ancient peoples, but it suited the complexity of the modern world and had its own beauty. And then my political innocence shattered.

The moment of shattering came when two policemen walked across a deserted park to tell me, a lone Englishwoman, that I no longer had the right to be outside. (2)

The incident was part of a seismic shift that took place in almost all Western democracies in the early months of 2020, a shift from the belief that rights are inherent, held by the people individually and collectively, to the idea that rights are granted or withheld by the governing powers. At the time, you remember, the assurance was that the suspension of rights was but temporary, done for an exceptional reason that would soon pass. But as time went on and politicians, the media and big business talked of the need for new restrictions for a variety of reasons, from flu to flight emissions, it became clear that a potentially lasting shift in the balance of power was underway.

My recent return to Britain confirmed that this was happening apace in the cradle of Western democracy. The government may be in crisis, but Boris Johnson's recent resignation was not about Partygate, the scandal that demonstrated, once and for all, that the governing elite were imposing restrictions they knew to be unnecessary. As Jon Dobinson points out: 'When leaders make rules they have no intention of following themselves – and think they can get away with it – that’s one sign that democracy is dying. When there is no effective opposition to it, that’s another.'

'Double standards are one of the key features of a corrupt, autocratic system. Obviously, those who make repressive rules don’t intend to abide by them. They wield power, they are not subject to it.'

I've been baffled by the lack of public anger at revelations, widely reported in the media, that the ruling class were repeatedly imposing life-blighting measures on tens of millions for reasons other than public health. There has no public debate about the wisdom of such measures and a widespread belief that they will never happen again sits oddly with casual comments from politicians indicating that they wouldn't rule them out in future. Meanwhile, a raft of anti-democratic legislation is going through Parliament, enshrining measures which will limit freedom of speech and the right to protest on a permanent basis.

This anti-democratic shift is observable across the Western world, in the New World nations of Australia and Canada and in the formerly liberal countries of Europe, where the re-elected President Macron has tried to re-introduce vaccine passports for entry to France and Germany plans to reimpose mask mandates in the autumn.

Is this the end of the line for liberal democracy? Some observers of the political scene think it could be.

'We're threatened with the end of the liberal era,' says Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute. 'There's a fundamental challenge to everything we believe about ourselves, and what kind of societies we want to live in.' The threat, he adds, 'doesn't fit into any of the old categories of fascism or socialism: this is a different kind of technocratic dictatorship that's a fundamental challenge to everything that we'd been taught to believe all our lives.'

If, we decide, post-pandemic, that we still believe in human rights, he adds, stressing the 'if'', we will need to ‘figure out ways to re-infuse the liberal experience with the natural dramas of life itself instead of creating ever-safer playgrounds.'

In mid-2022, it's clear that we're dealing with a crisis that extends way beyond a single public health emergency: a crisis of democracy.

II

What happened? Were democratic values never as fully rooted as I thought? Or did something fundamental change?

There are some brilliant analyses of the complex forces of modernity, technology and capitalism which have created the conditions for this anti-democratic shift. They pinpoint key moments in the march towards technocracy such as the Credit Crunch, 9/11 which in turn can be traced back to the beginnings of modernity in the Industrial Revolution, Enclosures Act or even earlier, making the connections with the vested interests that have driven these changes. But here and now, I want to focus on two major societal changes of the first decades of the twenty-first century.

The first could be called Not Enough Tigers syndrome. It came to my attention on a sleepy afternoon in a Gloucester shop about a decade ago, a small, hippyish place selling a mix of New Age and wellbeing products. Between me and the shopkeeper I needed to pay for my essential oil was a woman talking in the cyclical, repetitive way of the highly anxious. Would the thing she wanted to buy do this? What about that? But what if this? And what would she do if …? And so on.

It was some time before the spate of anxiety burnt itself itself out, having been wondrously handled by the shopkeeper, a shaven-head woman in the garb of a buddhist monk. Her anxious customer departed, she turned to me with an eye roll. 'Not enough tigers,' she said, 'It's very common in Gloucester.'

I knew exactly what she meant. A few years before, I'd returned to home ground to do a piece on the impact of higher-than-usual flooding on local people and services. Amid the hazy memories of the many interviews I did one sticks out: a dramatic account by a middle-aged woman of having to drive through some high water. Never in her life, ever, had she experienced anything so horrific, she shuddered. Never, as God was her witness, would she go through such a thing again. Not Enough Tigers indeed. In the years that followed the phrase came to mind when I witnessed an extreme example of the cushioned consumerism of the West in comparison to the real risks and dangers faced daily by many people elsewhere in the world.

Still, I thought Not Enough Tigers syndrome harmless enough until – under its more common name of safetyism – it was used during the Covid crisis as a justification for the imposition of a level of control over people never previously known. Danger!

For Tucker, safetyism constitutes a major threat to liberal democracy, helping to explain why so many have been willing to abandon liberal values in favour of causes that involve drama: 'We've wanted to preserve liberalism while draining it of all of its risk … with the aspiration of making extremely comfortable lives for everybody,' he says. 'Unfortunately, it's boring. A safe liberalism is just too boring to people and they began to look for ways of living more meaningful lives.'

At the same time, populism has been on the rise in Western democracies, and not just in obvious places such as Hungary. Populism is a capacious, loosely-defined term that can be used by both the left and the right and apply to both positive and negative expressions of people power. I am using it here to refer to the emergence of a style of doing politics driven by strong, generally negative, emotions. Anger and fear, discontent and anxiety have risen to the surface in recent years, creating a public mood which presents politicians seeking an easy route to power with some unhealthy temptations. At best, politicians in populist mode offer simple solutions to complex problems which inevitably fail, leading to more discontent. At worst, they actively exploit public fear and resentment, using them as a means to introduce authoritarian measures and create division. Either way, the deliberative policymaking and public debate which is essential to a functioning democracy goes out of the window.

A populist polity has a certain kind of leader. The election of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are obvious examples, but with Covid an unexpected example emerged in Canada, a country which had previously represented everything that was liberal, tolerant and reasonable. In this enlightening interview for The Pulse, media analyst Richard Garner explains how Justin Trudeau's rise to the top was not due to a desire for public service or a talent for governance, but because the struggling Liberal Party's priority was to appoint a leader who could win them votes. And so they chose a good looking drama teacher, someone who, as the clip of him speaking at his father's funeral shows, is all about performance and eliciting emotion.

'The political parties now understand that the way to work the room isn't policy, isn't great ideas designed to help and serve people [or] the way to achieve your ultimate agenda, which is always to stay in power,' says Garner. 'In this day and age you hire actors, you hire performers, you hire people that can go out and emote, connect with that person and affect them emotionally.'

The result is a political culture which is rigged against people having a meaningful input or bringing about real change: '[it] allows for this type of fraud, corruption and gatekeepering that makes sure nobody's that's a threat to the system can ever ascend to take down the system. That's the political system, that's the media system – that's the structure of the kind of society we live in.'

The effect of populist policymaking is beginning to have a marked effect on people's everyday lives. In an interview with financial analyst Louis Gave about the economic crisis afflicting the West, Freddie Sayers asks why any serious policymaker would tear up energy contracts with Russia in order to pay higher prices to the same provider for the same fuel.

'The big issue we live with today is that, because of the rise of social media, whenever something bad happens, Russia invades Ukraine, immediately there's a clamour on social media that “something must be done”,' replies Gave. 'What's something? Tearing up longterm oil contracts, that's something – it's the old yes, minister joke: “Something must be done, that's something, so let's do that.”' Such an approach wins the policymaker immediate public approval for taking action but ignores the likely consequences in the longer term: high prices, energy shortages and turmoil in the global finance system. 'Any policymaker who cares to look beyond the current news cycle wouldn't do this,' says Gave. 'But we live in a virtue signalling age where you have to be seen in the right-here, right-now. Forget the long term consequences.'

In a previous Substack, I mentioned information via someone in Downing Street about the government's intention to impose another lockdown in England last winter. Recently I spoke to that person again and learned that the official concerned was now suffering professional consequences for his involvement in Partygate. I asked whether, with the benefit of hindsight, Party Man thought he’d done anything wrong. ‘None of them do,' came the swift response. There was a widespread sense that government couldn’t have done anything else, he added, since the people in the focus groups consulted demanded Action.

Do you see the circle that I see? The people blame the government, and the government blames the people.

Observing the contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party which will determine Britain's next Prime Minister, Neil Oliver notes the absence of any sense of responsibility: 'The most damaging public policy in living memory, maybe ever, and they're pretending like it never happened. And no one's taking any responsibility for it, and yet they were all complicit in what happened – the lockdown that did so much damage, to the economy, to health, mental and physical, to the prospects of children, to the texture of society.

'Where is the candidate will stand up and say that under their leadership there would be no repeat of lockdown? No one's saying that, because they're all keeping thoughts like lockdown ready to do that again, if they're told to,' he asks. 'Where's the candidate who will say we'll never be forced into a world of digital ID? Or a world in which the currency that we've known is replaced by something digital and programmable?'

At the heart of the democracy crisis lies a crisis of responsibility

Central London the day before Johnson resigned...

III

Recently I heard a health worker talk movingly of her journey to a new way of seeing after thirty years in the National Health Service. It began with looking at official statistics and realising the official line about Covid simply didn't add up. After she was told that, despite having had Covid, she would have to get vaccinated if she wanted to keep her job, she decided to retire early. 'At the age of nearly sixty, I've lost my innocence,' she concluded.

Since we're on the territory of shattered innocence, let's take a deeper look and ask a difficult question: are the democratic values of the West shallow-rooted?

Perhaps Western democracies' response to Covid laid bare something that was always there, a fault line between those who like to be told how to live and those who prefer self-governance. In other words, the Covid crisis became a proxy for a split about authority and its source. Is the locus of authority internal (if, depending on your political theology, an internal experience of an external force)? Or is it external, held by other humans deemed to be wiser and better equipped for decision-making than you and the people around you?

‘In a democracy, you have to trust your leaders,' a friend told me by way of reproach for my scepticism about UK government policy. I was baffled by this remark: this wasn't my conception of democracy at all; my friend's sounded more like a twenty-first century version of the Divine Right of Kings in which subjects owe the governing elite unquestioning allegiance.

In this piece on whether Covid spells the end of democracy, Matthew Crawford sheds light on why two modern Western citizens might hold such divergent views. Crawford identifies a second strand of thinking in Western liberal democracy, one less well-known than the Lockean view of the citizen as rights-holder. The Hobbesian version of liberalism begins with a state of emergency (the state of nature where life is 'nasty, brutish and short'), and the consequent need for strong government. 'This Hobbesian picture,' writes Crawford, 'needs us to think of ourselves as vulnerable, so the state can play the role of saving us.' In contrast to the Lockean conception of the person who makes a rational deal in order to improve her situation, the Hobbesian compact is forged in fear. Consent is given on a one-off basis rather than being subject to ongoing checks and balances, and the resulting social contract is essentially monarchical in character. In today's world, Crawford argues, the Hobbesian version of liberalism 'underwrites a technocratic, progressive form of politics.'

Crawford's account chimes with a sad truth about modern Western democracies: a growing public disengagement from politics. You could say that most people are effectively contenting themselves with the Hobbesian version of liberal democracy, a version that goes something like this: Yes, I believe in democracy as long as the big decisions are taken for me and I don't, beyond periodically re-affirming my consent at the ballot box, have to think about them.

So here’s a thought that’s a little on the dark side. 'Going along to get along' is a phrase used to refer to a common response to oppressive rule. It implies that the people who comply with overbearing rules would really prefer freedom but are discouraged from speaking out for fear of the consequences. But what if some modern Westerners were in fact only 'going along' with liberal democracy and, once that system ceased to be the orthodoxy, actively preferred to be ruled by the strong?

I think that, in reality, the number of true political submissives is low. History tells us that ordinary people living under the oppressive regimes of the past didn't get much satisfaction or enjoyment out of the arrangement unless they had some power themselves and were a part of the system. Instead, I think what we're seeing play out in Western democracies now is more a kind of listlessness, an unwillingness or inability to engage with that all-important, often tedious matter of how we organise our common life together.

The ancient Greek term 'thumos' roughly translates as spiritedness, an internal quality linked to the life force. Depending on the circumstances, it can issue in righteous anger or a drive for truth. Without it, people are there for the taking, ripe for domination.

'Is he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog or any other animal? Have you never observed how invincible and unconquerable is a spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of any creature to be absolutely fearless and indomitable?' asks Plato in The Republic.

Maybe part of what is afflicting the peoples of the West is a kind of spiritlessness.

And, if so, how do we get our spirit back?

IV

Briefly, I started thinking about alternative systems of government that might be better equipped to keep the power with the people. If not liberal democracy in its nation state form, then perhaps more regional forms of government, in which people and their leaders are more closely connected? Or how about the ultimate in self-government - anarchism?

Then I realised that the formal set-up was not the problem. Systems without spirit, democracies without well-rooted values guarantee nothing. (What about the constitution? I protested to a German friend last year as we discussed the country's descent into Covid tyranny. 'They changed it,' he shrugged.)

Underpinning any just political system of the future must be an inner shift on a mass scale, a change in hearts and minds which would transmute the anxiety, atomisation and passivity characteristic of modern Western society into ways of being more compatible with the energies and realities of life. At the core of such a change would be a renaissance of trust in self and intuition, a greater connection with the surrounding world, both natural and human, and the ceding of an over-focus on abstraction to greater primacy to lived experience. When authority resides within (wo)man and her maker, however that maker is conceived, life, nature, Spirit, whatever, the contracting out of authority to distant elites, obeying instructions delivered through screens, makes little sense.

This is not a new idea; such a shift has been discussed in many quarters of the spirituality and consciousness movement for many years. New Earth thinking talks of a leap in human evolution that has long been in the making (and, some say, prophesied by indigenous people), one that extends way beyond biological Darwinian thinking to encompass psychological and spiritual developments that finally enable humanity to leave the destructive tendencies that lead to war and oppression behind. Inevitably, the passage from where we are now to such a transformation will be difficult: 'The birthing of a new era, the coming-of-age ordeal of the human race, may be a bit messy,' writes Charles Eisenstein in Sacred Economics. 'It will probably involve the usual accompaniments to economic collapse—fascism, civil unrest, and war—but I think this dark age will be far shorter and mostly more mild than one might reasonably expect.'

So where does that leave us now? Some New Earth thinking suggests that all we need to do is sit out the dark times until the dawning of the new age. But, as Joe Martino on the Collective Evolution podcast, asks: ‘What if this is about us having to participate?’ In conversation about the aridity of a democracy in which no change is possible, Jason Quitt suggests that much of this talk of evolution involves good old-fashioned escapism, which (my observation) ironically mimics the passivity which created the conditions for the crisis in democracy in the first place. Martino argues that, while it may be time to pull out of existing political systems, that 'doesn't mean “go, put your head in the sand”. You still need to figure out how you're going to engage in the politic of society in some way.'

The issues raised in the dialogue highlight the importance of the psychology in the political. In her analysis of the social psychology that fostered the totalitarian takeovers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt identified hope as a passive emotion that prevented people from finding the courage to take action. It was a form of denial, akin to the common sensical attitude of 'it couldn't happen here' which in many cases paralysed people until it was too late and to the camps they went. She coined the new word of natality to denote the more generative state of mind that leads to action. Arendt scholar Samantha Rose sums up the contrasting attitudes: 'Hope augments our vision, turning us away from the world before us, but natality is a political disposition and it is the possibility of political action.'

Tucker, for his part, is clear about the dangers of denying the democracy crisis: 'We need a dramatic rethinking in the twenty-first century. Anybody who tells you that we don't need that is not facing the truth. The crisis is real and massive and global, and so too is the need for a complete cultural revolution. If we continue down this path the disasters of the last two years are going to look like nothing compared to what we face in the future.

'We still do have a chance to turn around [but] it's going to take many, many individuals and institutions in order to achieve this. Everybody has a role when civilisation is sweeping to destruction, in order to save what it is we love.'

Notes

1. The phrasing and sentiments of that sentence may sound familiar, so in the interests of full attribution here is the quotation that inspired it: “If I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am, when I have done nothing wrong and when I am simply ambling along and breathing God's fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman, then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it.” Boris Johnson, 25 November, 2004, The Daily Telegraph

2. Full details in 'the Right to Nature' section of Human Flourishing 2022: A Manifesto.

Photo by danna & curious tangles