Opinion: Democracy on the decline for first time in 70 years

AFTER 70 years of democracy flourishing, we are now witnessing the first reversal of freedoms we once took for granted, writes Dennis Atkins.

AFTER 70 years of democracy flourishing, with civil society and prosperity growing after the conclusion of the second great war of the last century, we are now witnessing the first reversal of freedoms we once took for granted.

This is not a whimsical observation but is based firmly on empirical evidence. The institutions that grew up after World War II – the UN, the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and other multilateral oversight bodies – have either become bogged down in bureaucracy and paralysis by analysis or simply lost effectiveness because people no longer take them seriously.

The rise of populism and the temptation towards authoritarianism that goes with it can be found just about everywhere in what’s known as the community of Western democracies. These nativist movements have grown in popularity in the US, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Scandinavian countries and most nations that make up the former Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

In Hungary and Poland, populist parties which promote a heavy-handed crackdown on immigration and are antithetical to freedoms such as an unfettered media are running the governments. The Austrian Government contains ministers from the xenophobic anti-immigrant Freedom Party.

US President Donald Trump is symptomatic of the global direction of democracy. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

US President Donald Trump found his path to victory by exploiting the anxieties of voters who had had enough of globalisation, feared immigration, and lived in a state of economic and job insecurity.

A year ago Francis Fukuyama, the American political philosopher who famously said the West’s victory in the Cold War in 1990 was “the end of history”, gave his most forceful mea culpa for that overreach.

“Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t have a sense or a theory about how democracies can go backward,” Fukuyama said. “And I (now) think they clearly can.”

Now the top thinkers on political, strategic and historical trends – the editors and writers of the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine – have also red-flagged the future of democracy.

The May/June issue, on the newsstands last week, is titled Is Democracy Dying? A Global Report.

Walter Russell Mead, a foreign affairs professor and The Wall Street Journal’s Global View columnist, says the challenge to protect and save democracy is immense.

“The foundations of societies are quaking at home, even as the international order threatens to splinter,” Mead writes in Foreign Affairs.

“In the US, policymakers and politicians now find themselves accountable to a public that may become defensive and antagonistic under the stress of economic and cultural change.

“The old answers in the old textbooks don’t seem to work anymore, the new answers haven’t been discovered yet, and those who will someday write the new textbooks are still in primary school.”

Mead reminds us we are problem-solving animals who thrive on challenges.

Turns out the end of the Cold War was not ‘the end of history’.

In another essay in this call to arms edition, University of Michigan Professor Ronald Inglehart cautions that democratic decline is not inevitable and rising prosperity continues in most developed countries, even if the trajectory is not linear.

“In the developed world, the current wave of authoritarianism will persist only if societies and governments fail to address the underlying drivers,” Inglehart writes.

“If new political coalitions emerge to reverse the trend toward inequality and ensure that the benefits of automation are widely shared, they can put democracy back on track.

“But if the developed world continues on its current course, democracy could wither away.

“If there is nothing inevitable about democratic decline, there is also nothing inevitable about democratic resurgence.”

What’s besetting democracies is inequality and the social disadvantage that goes with it.

People want easy and affordable health care, secure jobs with genuine rights and adequate remuneration.

Other necessities for families, such as affordable child care, are also high on the list of demands.

A failure to ensure some or all of these basics causes the alienation that drives people into the arms of populist parties and movements – often sparking the democratic decay that’s worrying much of the Western world.

Governments need to place improving people’s quality of life rather than providing tax cuts for the rich and the corporate elites at the top of their policy agenda.

The sure-fire way to speed up any harm to democracy is to increase the gap between the haves and have nots – to place wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller proportion of the population and business community.

Dennis Atkins is The Courier-Mail’s national affairs editor