Democracy after Trump

It is time to face a difficult question. Is democracy all that good? How do we relate to democracy when it produces evil? Can we give up on democracy?
We needn’t have waited for Donald Trump’s return to power to ask this question. We could have asked this after his first victory in 2016. Or, after Narendra Modi’s triumph in 2019, or perhaps after his popular endorsement following the violence in Gujarat in 2002. Or, if we cared to look at the rest of the world, after Viktor Orban’s rise to power in Hungary in 2010, Benjamin Netanyahu’s vice-like grip in post-2009 Israel, the Rajapaksa family’s control in Sri Lanka after 2004, the beginning of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reign in Turkey in 2003, or Thaksin Shinawatra’s victory in Thailand in 2001 — the list is endless.
The simple point is that the record of actually existing “democracies” in delivering good outcomes is not so good. The phenomenon of democratically elected and re-elected leaders unleashing bad politics — chaos, corruption, criminality, ethnicide, ecological destruction — while retaining their popularity is not something new. If we care to look without blinkers and beyond affluent European societies, it is hard to resist the conclusion that what we assumed to be the benefits of a normal, functional democracy are largely fictional. Success stories of democracies are usually happy coincidences that last for a limited period. These episodes are bright stars in a dark sky of shades of disappointments, failures and disasters. “Democratic” governments do not improve our chances of good governance, the rule of law or well-being of its citizens.
When it comes to assessing outcomes, there are only three serious arguments in defence of democracy. One, that democratic governments fare no worse in this respect than authoritarian governments. Two, a democracy enhances the chances of decisions leading to bad outcomes being detected and corrected. And three, a democracy enhances a citizen’s self-worth, irrespective of whether they get what they want. These arguments are good enough to reject the authoritarian alternative, but these hardly constitute a ringing endorsement of the modern world’s ideological deity.
This sober record has not affected celebrations of the dominant model of democracy and attempts to export it all over the world. The dominant theory of democracy kept up the fiction that instances of democratic failure were exceptions to an otherwise benign global tide of democratisation. The charm of democracy has led everyone to believe that “populist” leaders acquired and retained power despite democracy, not because of democracy. The trouble is that, like market failures, these democratic failures are not aberrations or a malfunctioning of the democratic apparatus. These possibilities are built into the political system we call democracy. If democracy is majority rule, it clearly allows and encourages such outcomes.
An acknowledgement of this truth might be misunderstood as an anti-democratic position. It is not. An honest audit of the track record of actual democracies is a must, if we hope to save the idea of democracy. Unless we recognise and correct this propensity of modern democracies, this form of government could turn against the people, and that too in the name of the people. Such a clear-eyed approach to democracy is not such a strange idea as might appear today. After all, B R Ambedkar’s historic speech on the eve of the adoption of the Indian Constitution had alerted us to exactly this kind of danger. M N Roy’s advocacy of “partyless democracy” and Jayaprakash Narayan’s critique of parliamentary democracy reflected the urge to search for new forms of democracy.
In recent times, John Dunn, among the few professional political theorists who actually help us make sense of the real world of politics in plain, if terse, English, has alerted us to a serious conflation that lies at the root of our predicament. What we call democracy today is three things rolled into one. Democracy is one of the most used and abused words in our times, a word with amazingly universal provenance, the most potent term for claiming political authority in global political speech. It is also a charming political ideal that outcompetes any foreseeable rival, a vision of a society where all citizens have equal, effective control over all significant collective decisions. Finally, and most oddly, democracy also stands for a political mechanism, usually that of representative government through periodic elections that are decided by some form of majority rule. Over the 20th century, this mechanism was translated into a checklist that every country was supposed to tick.
Today we face a gigantic sleight of hand, a conceptual trick, that has created an equivalence of these three meanings of democracy — the word, the ideal and the mechanism. So, the moral charm of the ideal of democracy is used to reinforce the potency of the word democracy and their combined power is deployed to justify the rulers who manage to tick enough boxes in the institutional checklist of democracy. These three are bundled so tightly that any questioning of democracy as a form of government is presumed to be an attack on the very ideal of democracy. This leads to a “hypnotic spell” that can be a moral cloak to cover dubious and dangerous regimes.
Any serious engagement with democracy must unbundle democracy as an idea and ideal from democracy as an actually existing form of government. A lazy celebration of anything that passes for democracy is not just intellectually damaging it is also politically disastrous. In a world where everyone and everything seeks this label, a conflation of democracy as an idea and as an adjective for actual regimes can only lead to moral and political paralysis.
There are two possible ways ahead. One option, powerfully argued by Dunn, is to “break the spell” of democracy, detach the regimes from lofty ideals of democracy and then treat democracy just as one more form of government that carries no special claims to moral authority. This is an intellectually more cogent approach as we would not live in denial any more.
The other, radically different, option would be to re-enchant democracy. This would mean taking the high ideals of democracy seriously and examining each actually existing society that claims to be a democracy against those powerful ideals. That would involve a willingness to acknowledge that the so-called democratic regimes do not offer to their citizens anything that remotely resembles equal power to shape political, policy or personal outcomes that matter to the people. It requires a willingness to say that we don’t have any finished product, any real model of democracy, that what we have are at best potential democracies, that democracy is a work in progress. We owe at least this much to Donald Trump.

--by Yogendra Yadav, Leader, Social Worker: