The War Against Democracy, and Why We’re Losing It

By umair haque

June 8, 2019 (medium.com)

I woke up the other morning to alarming, disturbing, and absurd news. A member of British parliament, one of the most powerful men in the country — is floating a plan to…suspend Parliament. On the sly. Using a centuries old procedure usually reserved for wars, plagues, and other such happy events.

Why? To ram through a Brexit that appears to be undeliverable, which keeps getting postponed, because, understandably, once you’re finally teetering on the edge of the precipice of the abyss, jumping off suddenly becomes a whole lot scarier than bellowing about it bravely from afar. So. Suspending parliament? What the? Is there a world war on nobody’s heard about? Is a zombie epidemic ripping through the land? So why literally tear a hole through the fabric of democracy? Because you can.

But he is far from alone. Across the pond, the headlines go something like this: “Trump directs staffers not to comply with Congressional subpoenas.” Or, more accurately, “President instructs regime not to obey law.” The similarities should be obvious.

There is a kind of war on. On both sides of the Atlantic, democracy is under severe, sustained, strategic, deliberate attack. From…within democracy. From the very top of democracy. From the people whose job and task it is, for heaven’s sake, to enact, defend, and safeguard it. From politicians, “leaders”, political parties, lobbyists, even professors. There is a whole extremist infrastructure — from organizations to “thinking” to money waging war on the idea of democracy itself.

But when democracy goes with it…it tends to take civilization, too. A kind of vicious cycle of ruin begins, from which it can take not just decades but much, much longer to escape, sometimes centuries. Whole dark ages, in fact. Yet we often don’t understand just how much we’re giving up when we give up on the hard work of democracy — nor do even the staunchest defenders of democracy often enough understand how fast and hard a democracy can fall.

This newfound axis originates in America. There, a bizarre coterie of “thinktanks”, pundits, politicians, lobbyists, cable news channels, and interest groups have made the idea that democracy — the real thing, as in equality, freedom, and justice for all — is bad, undesirable, dangerous, and burdensome so widespread, so routine, that they managed to power a comedy authoritarian all the way to…the White House. This war is spreading around the globe — and you can see which side is winning pretty easily just by glancing at both sides of the Atlantic.

Now, this may or may not come as no great news to you. But I want you to understand how dire this situation really is.

It’s one thing for a country to have a few extremist representatives — Congresspeople, members of parliament, and so forth. That’s quite alright — as long as they don’t have the lion’s share of power, or even a great deal, really. It happens even in the most sophisticated and mature and robust democracies. And in a way, it tells us something, it has, as American theory would say, “informational value.” It says that there are probably parts of society growing frustrated, their needs unment, who are being ignored. As long as the rest of the democratic process is working, everything is well: that signal can be heard, and those needs can be met.

It’s alright, too, for politicians to have to dally with extremists. Perhaps not full on fascists — there are some ideas beyond the pale of civilized progress. But part of a politicians’ job is to find consensus, and another part is to lead. To do both those things, they will have to truck with all kinds of groups the “other side” probably disagree vehemently with. Socialist, libertarians, conservatives, and so forth. That’s quite alright too. If a politicians won’t meet with such groups — who can she lead? What consensus can she create? So this — a spectrum of “sides”, which is to say preferences, that politicians both lead and manage — is an essential process of democracy, too.

But what’s happening on both sides of the Atlantic couldn’t be more different than the above. The extremists aren’t powerless representatives who merely signal that there are problems in groups or parts or segments of society. They have taken control of the democratic structure and process wholesale. And they aren’t meeting with with groups of different preferences to lead them, or to create consensus between them — they are pandering to the most extreme, backwards, and violent parts of society. What’s happening on both sides of the Atlantic is democracy being suffocated, choked, and violated, before our very eyes.

What does it say when a British cabinet member proposes…suspending parliament? When a President instructs his administration to ignore the law? There are words for these things, which aren’t words, really but, concepts, ideas, warning signals, fire alarms. Such words are authoritarianism, fascism, and extremism. They are democratic breakdown, collapse, and implosion.

When a President instructs his administration to ignore the law, a democracy could hardly be in more dire peril. When a cabinet member proposes suspending parliament, a democracy could hardly be in more dire peril. There are only really a few steps beyond this — and those are the last few, the stuff of dystopian fantasy. Martial law, troops in the streets, papers being checked, and so forth.

And yet are any of those things really fantasies? I know that you dismiss them. Sensible people are told they must. But if I told you just five years ago that America would be operating a network of concentration camps, led by an aspiring demagogue, who professes great admiration for figures like Kim Jong-Un, not to mention Vlad Putin…would you have believed me? Or would you have laughed it off as fantasy? If I’d told you just five years ago that Britain would have had something like a collective mental breakdown, a fit of hysteria, a delusional tantrum of self-destruction…and vengefully turned on its biggest trading partner, oldest friends, and strongest allies…would you have believed me? You probably would have dismissed that as fantasy, too.

At every stage of democratic collapse, Americans and Brits have badly underestimated just how far, fast, and ruinously they would fall. That’s no great surprise: people often do. Many revolutions are born with noble ideals…only to peter out into apocalyptic flames. America itself hoped to be a noble nation of the free..but when it came time to write the Constitution, it ended up a slave state, worse still than the Europe it had fled for freedom’s sake. The ironies of history.

And yet the ironies of history are born precisely because all too often, societies don’t understand the reckonings history places before them. Societies are made of people, who are fallible, capricious, shallow things — so perhaps that’s no great surprise.

Yet history tests us in just the same way, over and over again. Will we choose selfishness and greed, or expansiveness and compassion? Will we use violence to attain our ends — or grasp towards them gently? Can we hold each other close, even in lean times — or shall we turn on each other the moment that the night falls, and the winter comes?

The same tests, over and over again. From Egypt to Athens to Rome to…now. To Britain and America now. Do you know when Athenian democracy finally fell? When the Athenians felt threatened and insecure enough to turn to a group of authoritarian strongmen. Even Athenian culture, as vibrant and proud as it was, wasn’t wise enough not to make Socrates drink hemlock. And with the fall of Athenian democracy went all that was true and noble about it: philosophy, art, literature, drama. What we think of as civilization went, too, when democracy went — not to recur for centuries, really.

We underestimate, therefore, the speed and pace and fury with which a democracy can fall. Habitually so. From the very beginnings of time. And we underestimate the stakes, too. “The fall of democracy? So what?”, we seem to say — especially in degenerate times, like these. The Romans had their coliseums and border provinces to conquer and their Neros. We have our Kardashians and Irans and reality TV and Trumps. Degenerate times. “Democracy falling? So what?”

But the truth of the matter is that the fall of democracy takes with it all that we regard as civilized. Civilized: beautiful, true, noble. Noble. Decent. Humane. Cultured. That is because as a democracy falls, so too do all the following things: justice, freedom, dignity, equality, the common good, the future, and the past. What is left? Nothing but this, right now, the moment. And the vicious quest to dominate it. To control everything in it. To own it, full, all the people, all the lives, all the land. To possess — and to take.

Civilization is the opposite impulse, though, and it always has been: to give, to nurture, to nourish, to share. From Athenians sharing great tragedies we still revere in the very first amphitheatres — not Romans revelling in the taking of a life, but Athenians mourning the mythologized end of one — to the first European town squares. Civilization is just this act of standing besides another life, not above it, or below it.

Barbarism, which is the opposite of civilization, is plain to see in America today. The Taliban would be proud of a new spate of laws that punish women with jail time for…miscarriages. Of politicians who aim to ban birth control — and applaud when a new concentration camp is built. You can see American barbarism everywhere — in the regular school shootings, in the way black people are treated, in the casual bigotry and patriarchy of the Ivy League, in the frat-bro rape-culture which informs and shapes the American mind from the day it becomes an adult, in the endless wars and the constant message to be greedy, selfish, and superficial. In Kardashians and Trumps and Bezoses, new ruling dynasties. Folly upon folly. Barbarism on barbarism.

If civilization is the impulse to nourish, to tend, to stand beside, as an equal, then barbarism is it’s negation. It is the impulse, the desire, to enslave, to force, to hurt, to abuse, to harm. It is the burning need for superiority and supremacy, by means of violence, both soft and hard, institutionally, culturally, socially sanctioned violence. Do you see those impulses surging through America today? Through Britain? I do.

And that brings me back to what’s happening on both sides of the Atlantic. What is a President who instructs his administration to ignore the law, and a cabinet member who proposes suspending parliament, really doing? They are taking. They are taking everything for themselves. The word we so casually call “democracy”. But democracy also means civilization — and civilization means all that we, civilized people, have come to treasure and cherish: freedom, justice, equality, truth, knowledge, meaning, happiness, dignity. They are taking all those things away, and replacing them with what history has always tempted fools with: violence, power, dominance, control, supremacy, superiority.

There are no greater seductive temptations than those, my friends — to be a master of the world, a little king of your very own — and we badly underestimate their allure to the weary, the defeated, the abandoned, while overestimating our society’s resistance to them. How many Americans seem to really care that concentration camps and gestapos now operate in their midst? Why do the Democrats not impeach? Why did women vote for a sexist predator to be President? That is why democracies fall faster and harder than we think, over and over again in human history. From Athens to Rome to now. We severely underestimate the glittering temptations of barbarism — and we badly overestimate just how strong and robust the ideals, norms, values, and institutions of civilization really are: we think they will last forever, all by themselves. But so did the Romans and the Athenians.

“Everything will be fine!” cried the Americans. The Athenians. The Romans. Was it? We human beings have never really understood a difficult truth. Democracy is like an eternal child. As fragile as a summer day.

That brings me, I suppose, to me and you. Are America and Britain still civilized countries? Were they ever? Is there more work to do? Will they become even more uncivilized, and regress backwards into what the rest of the world, laughing, jaw dropped, regards as barbarism? We will see, my friends, we will see.

Umair
June 2019