Why Defend Democracy?

Sounds like a stupid question, but after 15 years of democratic politics defined almost solely by outrage and what you’re AGAINST, it bears repeating what people regularly risk their lives FOR.

So, in the end, it’s all moving quite quickly, and even if things don’t end in the worst-case scenario – say, WWIII – the world is now another, and anything that evolves on the other side of all this will be the way it is because of this, for better or for worse. Over the past 25 years, trust in politics has been slowly eroding, whether on account of the distrust in governance sown by neoliberal and libertarian figureheads, the continuous onslaught of critical theory aimed at the rot of modern Western liberal democracy, the purposeful strategies of our now well-entrenched authoritarians, or just everyday people become disenchanted with what come off as a group of Mandarin leaders, far-removed from the population, who seem more tied to the interests of big money than they do a functioning landscape of governance for the people. Add to that the many wars, massive technological disruption, and all the growing pressures of climate change, and it is not too surprising that democracy has taken a reputational beating. Not least, because, by its very nature, democracy comes off as a toothless system for self-defense in times of relative peace. It functions on dialogue, deliberation, compromise, and an eventual, extremely dull, flatly worded proclamation of one kind or another. Yet, as we sit here, it is under attack and facing the biggest threat since the end of WWII. The question for everyone living in countries perceived as democracies is: Will you defend it when the time comes? Because it will not be your choice whether it reaches your country, that decision will be made by today’s authoritarians and their allies in your country. You do not decide if there is war; war comes to you. At the same time, we can also look to history and see that freedom and liberty movements, whether for their creation or defense, have existed for as long as we have had societies. They take many forms; we just have to decide which form ours will take. I argue that democracy is still our best bet, and well worth fighting for, maybe now more than ever before.

Democracy might not be under such pressure were it not for the slow corrosion that has taken place in the so-called Western democracies since the 1980s and was passed on to newer ones from the 1990s onwards. Beginning with the onset of neoliberal policies, democratic politics lurched to the right, eventually settling somewhere off the center, where they could entice liberals and the somewhat left-leaning to follow them and the money without feeling they were selling out core ideals. Similar to the ‘80s axis of Reagan, Thatcher, and their continental allies, such as Kohl, the ‘90s center-left drift to corporate money under Clinton, Blair, and the likes of Schröder looked at their decade-plus away from power and losing badly to what seemed an ascendant neoliberal approach, jettisoned decades-old values, and ran to big money donors and interests and away from a social safety net. The politics of pure economics had all parties drifting to a center of the center-right, and away from a social values-based approach. Most big democratic parties moved away from their old bases and towards a hollowing out of political stances and general insincerity. This was driven by the quickly changing post-Cold War geopolitical landscape, followed by the post-9/11 shock, and culminating in the 2008 financial crisis. What is now completely self-evident took its form over those decades, with conservatives living out blatant hypocrisy in the face of their espoused values – religious and family values, general Western Enlightenment-aligned traditions, and moral standards – and liberals getting lost in their own contradictory value sets – abandoning the working class, lack of social and societal investment, overintellectualizion of their approach, as well as an overinvestment in critical theory to the point of a total objectivization of humanity. Both have reached a place where their proximity to power seems more essential than any kind of representation of the people. And the people rightly see and feel this and have become disenchanted. So, what are their options?

With hollowed out big conservative and social democratic parties, floundering green and liberal parties, and the nuclear superpowers of the US, China, Russia, and India – all of which are now free to clearly state themselves what they have always tended to be, ethnonationalist autocracies – now more brazenly exerting pressure on the mid-level powers (some with, some without nuclear arsenals) at a transactional fee, what chance does democracy really have? A withering and demented Trump upends decades of stability, letting the world know that the strong can now do as they wish. Israel has been making a good go of it, Iran not far behind, while Russia, China, and a whole list of old adversaries can’t believe their luck and get geared up to take (next) swings at their neighbors or each other. Add to that the decades, sometimes centuries, of rhetoric that point to democracy being a ploy to expand Western imperialistic capitalism (see the left wing) or a secular, domineering institution that tends towards handouts and state control (see the right wing), and democracy really seems to be staring down multiple barrels waiting to put it out of its misery. It feels like, from one day to the next, democracy faces a truly existential threat. The question then becomes: what future will the world’s population be bound to?

Looking around at various corners of the world that fail to regularly attract the glare of our media attention, or just focusing on the ground in exactly those places where democracy is currently most under threat, as well as looking to the past, can give us an insight into what “the people” want and are willing to do for it. For a year and a half now, people, especially young people, have been taking to the streets in Georgia to demand a more democratic process in their country, not to mention Russian troops to end the occupation of the northern region of their country. Serbians have been mobilizing against their government’s corruption, sometimes overcoming amazing odds, to put pressure on those in charge, to demand a more dignified politics for their country. Younger generations around the world regularly risk their lives to push for more say in their respective homelands. Iranians have been dying by the thousands at regular intervals for the last 20 years, demanding more rights for women and an end to the theocratic authoritarian rule. Eastern Europe, especially, sees young people pushing time and again against their governments and winning significant victories. In Hong Kong, the democracy movement put up an impressive fight against the Chinese Communist Party. Similar to those put up by the residents of East Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, in Tiananmen Square in 1989, across the Arab world in 2011, or the Maidan movement in Ukraine in 2014. South America’s traditions of standing up to authoritarianism are shared by their common history of military dictatorships. In any continent’s darkest hours, there have been groups and individuals who have risked their lives not in the service of some radicalized ideology or fundamentalist belief, but for democracy. If they and all the others who have come before us were all able to do it, then so can we. Today, the most important democratic battleground is obviously the United States, with Europe a close second. All the other major powers are already under the sway of ethnonationalist authoritarians, and the middle-range powers, including many democracies, will go whichever way makes sense to them economically and strategically.

Regular people across the US seem to be making a good case for community organization and the formation of strategic alliances that go well beyond the past demonstrative practices of the so-called Western democracies. Unions, churches, community organizations, and regular people are coming together in the face of mounting repression and an increasingly obvious power grab. With former democratic institutions such as major media outlets or the federal courts having failed, a more grassroots approach seems to be forming. There is hope that such movements can serve as templates for future struggles, and an international push can be made to take back power from corrupt authoritarians and their cronies, the ineffective major parties, as well as the corporations and billionaires who have proven the historical truth that they will side with whatever power rises, so long as they can keep making money (preferably more). This is a multi-front, hybrid war, and Europe needs to be ready, as it is now surrounded. People on the left and right must ask themselves which side they are on. Are they so disenchanted with the democracies they are living in that they are willing to be subjects to a more ruthless power, be that Russia, an ethnonationalist US, or their European lackeys (be it Reform, AfD, or Front National), or will they speak truth to power, challenge the morose party system and fight for a democracy that represents them, including standing up to foreign enemies. To be able to do this, to be sure of a righteous cause, one needs to know what one is fighting for. A look back at the hopes of those who risked their lives for simple democracy might help lay out a reason for defending democracy.

People standing up to an oppressor or occupier, whether foreign or domestic, can be witnessed throughout the entirety of human history. That doesn’t mean people were necessarily doing so to create a free state; oftentimes, it was to place their own king or queen on the throne. But it still stands that there is an inherent drive for people to want to control their own destiny within the frameworks they understand to be possible. Empires, kings, rulers, and chieftains have been dealing with rebellious peoples for as long as people have been banding together. There is an instinctive drive towards liberty, or at the very least, the drive not to be dominated and become subject to the whims of some all-powerful other. People have understood when the system, whatever its configuration, was not working for them. The movements across the established communist states in the 1980s, and in particular 1989, probably provide the best possible approach and orientation for our current situation – along with a significant warning of potential downsides. What most, if not all, of those movements had in common – from Leipzig to Beijing – was that they were not necessarily aiming for the abolition of the communist system, nor was it some strong yearning for capitalism, but rather the search for a “third way.” Beginning with Solidarność, people under communist rule sought more freedoms in how they structured their lives and work as opposed to the rigidity of the economies that had been stagnating since the 1970s. When people began meeting up in churches in East Berlin to discuss their ideas, they too sought a reform of the country, not its abolition. It feels like we face a similar decision today. Stand up to imperialistic forces of the superpowers who draw their lines of identity along nationalistic, heavily patriarchal, and discriminatory lines, as well as their allies in society who hope to sway their respective nations in the same direction. Or, make a concerted stand, challenge those who currently hold power and wield it ineffectually, and take the power and responsibility for a healthy society back. There is at this moment an international of the disaffected that stretches around the world, a democratic international that has quite modest demands – dignity, a say in how politics shapes their lives, a respectable standard of living, work, general security, and safety. That democratic international far outnumbers the insecure and power-hungry that control today’s world. But, again, they have until now understood themselves to exist in regional pockets, united only by an understanding of what they are against in their specific environments. A path forward would be to see what unites all these people, what they are, in essence, all fighting for, and what it is worth, particularly with an eye on the future.

Setting aside those going up against truly authoritarian regimes, what are the people facing who choose to stand up for democracy in today’s more decrepit systems? As outlined at the beginning, most are dealing with hollowed-out systems of representation, where politicians and party values tend to have long become symbolic. They are useful for getting near power or into office, but tend to be abandoned as soon as these goals have been achieved. This may not always be true, but it is definitely how it looks and feels to the broader public, and one assumes this is because power almost always sits near or at the same table as economic interests. Once in power, the various politicians tend to steer a similar course. Pressures exerted by climate change are slowly adapted to, often backtracked on, as the power of lobbying groups seems to be the decisive factor in terms of regulations. Promises regarding affordability or improvements to housing markets are easily made and just as easily broken, and no one actor seems up to taking on the many challenges we face in the 21^st century. This is the backdrop to people turning to the authoritarian mindset, as it at least offers answers. You can ignore the wildly obvious, blame immigrants, call on national identity and worship centuries-old history, give yourself over to the idea of engineering your way out of all your problems – anything but face the complicated realities of today and the possibly even more complicated and uncomfortable responses that they may require.

A push for democracy will be useless if it is only some kind of attempt to reinstate a norm because it was that norm, or its corruption, which led us to this place. A new, third way must be attempted. Maybe it would even come close to what those in the former communist Eastern Europe had begun to imagine for themselves. It must be a norm of community and cooperation on eye-level, not solely based on some inherent moral value of solidarity (though there is plenty to be said for that value), but because we need our societies to be both durable and flexible in the face of multiple global threats. It is not just the authoritarian push and the lack of a decisive political class, but the looming crises on our horizon, most of which are tied to the effects of the climate crisis. What we see today in connection with species extinction, over farming, wealth inequality, endemics and pandemics, or mass migration will be only the meek beginnings of unrest if a new way is not found to organize our governance and our societies and to work together. It seems like a reformed or reimagined democracy is exactly the tool to at least give us a fighting chance to counter this first wave of nihilistic, anti-democratic movements, push them back, and prepare the ground for what will be a long struggle for our future. This third way needs to lead us away from the current form of capitalist democracy, which sought such close ties to what increasingly appears to have been a sociopathic elite, and into a future that strengthens social cohesion to meet the massive stresses ahead. Democracy is ideal in this respect, as it is malleable enough to adopt a range of elements, parts, and ideas, and incorporate them into a functioning whole. If we cannot do this, then the chaos enacted by shifting environments and geographies will simply be subject to even more ruthless autocrats and warlords.

To accomplish a reanimation of democracy, a real strategy and real leadership are needed to fight the powerful who have made it fairly clear they do not want to lend a hand. Above all, these need to be new figures. We can see the beginnings of this in various regions. Peace must be made with certain faults and original sins of the past. Similarly to understanding that certain ideas and morals held in the major monotheistic religions hold inherent value, despite the millions of dead, abused, and disenfranchised those religions have caused, one can look to ideals of universalism and humanism (and indeed even liberalism) and disentangle specific important ideas from their racist, sexist, genocidal, and slave-based moralities, to broaden them into ideas of liberation. It is about divorcing the religions of left and right from their doctrines of progress and the promise of a utopian future and focusing on the “simple” betterment of society for all within them, that could establish a foundation from which to face our troubled future. We have to let go of the righteousness of our moralities, openly accept the hypocrisies we live in, with, and perpetrate, and most importantly, accept those who are willing to join and build alliances. We have to finally move on from democracy as hypocrisy, as Malcom X put it, and that goes far beyond the ruling class. We have to move on from negating an idea because it comes from the wrong person or source, or because of some personal stance. There is simply too much at stake for personal vendettas. It no longer matters what you are AGAINST; we are all well-versed enough to know the spectrums of outrage that define our societies. We need to know, and cherish, the things we are FOR, the ideas we are prepared to fully believe in and fight for. Nothing positive can be formed, indeed nothing at all can be created, from a negating stance. That only leads to destruction of one kind or another and nihilism. The creative impulse of understanding and compassion that enables steadfast defense and community will build a healthier society. Anyone who cannot step up or make alliances needs to get out of the way.

The fight for democracy has already begun, whether we like it or not. The last vestiges of liberal democracy are either blinded by old age or their proximity to money and power, not realizing the new world is already here. There is no going back to the former realities, and we now have to decide how far we are willing to go to defend the possibility of having a different, better future. Maybe the last 250-odd years have been an ongoing experiment to see if we can really make good on all the promises made in the Enlightenment, with the early 21^st century being just another chapter in the continuous dissolution of the hypocrisies enshrined in the founding documents of various nations, and another shot at getting it right. Maybe this time, it will be possible to form a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Those who hold power have shown themselves to be not just uninterested in this project but willing to destroy institutions, social contracts, and the lives of millions on a whim. Likewise, it seems, many citizens around the world are just as fine with being underlings to a domineering power, be that their own state or their regional superpower, explicitly stating that they will roll over for them if it means a good deal and not having to worry about anything too much. But the future is barreling down on us fast, and soon enough, we and our children, as well as later generations, will have to structure our lives in much more precarious circumstances. The question will then be, do you, your children, or your ancestors have a say in that future world? Will we be able to build a dignified society for all, or will we be outside of gated communities and cities, above the bunkers, having to fend for ourselves?