Death of democracy is now a live threat

Police officers attend an Extinction Rebellion demonstration outside Buckingham Palace in 2020. Picture: Getty Images

Democracy is going through a rough time. It is openly challenged by autocratic states like China, Russia and Iran. In the West’s oldest democracies, it is challenged from within by growing numbers who have lost faith in it as a form of government.

The Washington polling organisation Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy across the world for some 30 years. Britain has one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction with democracy in the world, at 69 per cent. Only Greece and Bulgaria are more disillusioned. A recent survey of political engagement in the UK found that a narrow majority wanted a strongman in power, someone who would sort things out without having to worry too much about parliament, judges, democratic debate or other impediments to decisive action.

Britain is not unique. Authoritarian figures have come to power with public support in many democracies: Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. In France and Germany, authoritarian parties are beating at the gates. Australia does quite well in the Pew Research surveys, with only 41 per cent dissatisfied, but it cannot expect to be immune from the anti-democratic tide that is engulfing the West.

Democracy is a system of collective self-government. Its survival depends on two things. One is an effective institutional framework for discovering the values and desires of a majority of citizens: parliaments, elections, free media, and so on. The other is respect for the rule of law and a culture of tolerance and pluralism, without which democracy cannot survive. People have to be willing to accept democratic decisions that they do not like.

It is because these qualities are not natural to human beings that some form of autocracy has always been the default condition of mankind. In the West, democracy has a short history. It emerged in very special circumstances just two centuries ago, in very different circumstances to those that obtain today. Respect for personal autonomy was at its height and the ­capacities of the state were limited.

Towards the end of his long life, John Adams, one of the founders of American democracy, warned that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes and exhausts itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” In using the word suicide he was making an important point. Democracies fail from within. They are rarely overwhelmed by powerful external forces such as invasion or insurrection. They fail because people spontaneously lose interest in democracy and turn to more authoritarian forms of government.

Why has democratic sentiment weakened in so much of the world? The answer is complex, and not necessarily the same everywhere. But it is possible to point to three main enemies of democracy: economic insecurity, fear, and intolerance.

Historically, democracies have always depended on economic ­optimism. Except in two short ­periods, the US has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity – both absolutely and relative to other countries – until quite recently. Other countries’ fortunes have been more chequered but the trajectory has generally been upwards.

Australia’s good fortune since World War II seems ­likely to be the main reason for its relatively high level of support for democracy. Today, the outlook is darker. We face problems of faltering growth, relative economic decline and capricious patterns of inequality. People measure their wellbeing against their expectations. Half a century of post-war expansion raised those expectations to stratospheric levels.

The Red Brigade of the Invisible Circus during a climate change protest at the Houses of Parliament at Westminster in London in 2019. Picture: Getty Images

The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any community. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe that began in 1914. That crisis was characterised by a general resort to totalitarianism. In the 1930s, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were widely regarded as models for the future, just as China sometimes is today.

When democracy cannot guarantee a continuously rising level of wellbeing for its citizens, people begin to reject it. This is particularly true of the young, who see their future clouding over while their parents’ generation are still enjoying the fruits of the good years. Authoritarian systems rarely do better, but that tends to be discovered too late.

Then there is the empire of fear. Historically, people who are sufficiently frightened of some external peril, such as invasion, violent crime or epidemic disease, have generally been willing to submit to an authoritarian regime that offers to protect them. Today, this is a bigger problem than it has been in the past because of the ever wider range of perils, physical, economic and psychological, from which people demand protection.

Of course, democracies can confer despotic powers on the state in emergencies without losing their democratic character. But there comes a point at which the systematic application of coercion is no longer consistent with collective self-government. If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so nothing can go wrong. If we call on the state to use its awesome power to defend us from the ordinary perils of human existence, we will end up doing it most of the time.

Finally, there is the mounting tide of intolerance. The campaigns of suppression conducted by pressure groups against unfashionable or “incorrect” opinions on controversial issues such as race, gender reassignment, same-sex relationships or climate change are a symptom of the narrowing of our intellectual world.

Demonstrations, such as those organised by the followers of Trump in Washington, Extinction Rebellion in Britain, or climate-change activists on the streets of Sydney, are all based on the idea that the campaigners’ point of view is the only legitimate one. No democratic outcome can therefore be tolerated which fails to give effect to it. On this view of the world, it is perfectly acceptable to bully people and disrupt their lives until they submit, instead of resorting to persuasion or ordinary democratic procedures.

This is the mentality of terrorists, but without the violence. Once we start telling ourselves that it is more important to get our way, democratic decision-making is done for. The result is the abandonment of political engagement and a general resort to direct action; that is, force.

Those who engage in direct action always believe that the end justifies the means, but they rarely confront the implications.

Since we are never likely to agree on controversial issues, what holds us together as societies is not consensus. It is precisely the methods by which we resolve our differences. It is a common respect for constitutional procedures, whether or not we like the outcome.

The transition from democracy to authoritarian rule is deceptively smooth. The outward forms are unchanged, but the substance is gone. Democracy is not formally abolished.

Instead, it is quietly redefined. It ceases to be a method of collective self-government but becomes something different, a set of values like communism, nationalism, or human rights.

The question whose values are to prevail can be resolved only by the crude exercise of power by the dominant ideology.

Will democracy resist these pressures in the next century? A generation ago it would have seemed strange even to ask the question. Today, it is a real issue.

Lord Sumption was a justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018, and delivered the BBC Reith Lectures for 2019. He is in Australia as a guest of the Robert Menzies Institute.