Why is Liberal Democracy on Life Support Everywhere?
Support for the institutions of Western-style liberal democracy is in decline almost everywhere. This is true for people on the left as well as on the right (more on this in a later post). People everywhere are reacting to the same set of changes in their personal lives induced by over 40 years of Thatcher-Reagan radical marketization. Those personal life changes have weakened trust in liberal democratic politicians and institutions by people across the political spectrum, because those politicians and institutions are doing far too little to counter those negative changes in people’s lives.
The right is responding with a politics of racist nationalism and a frontal attack on the institutions of liberal democracy, ironically by getting elected to legislatures and governing coalitions, and then having sympathetic conservatives placed in the courts and media, hence attacking liberal democratic institutions by occupying them. Outside these institutions there are escalating levels of right-wing violence and threats of violence.
Syriza, Sanders, Corbyn and Podemos mark the beginnings of a left strategy of working both inside and outside of the institutions of liberal democratic power. But we on the left are conflicted about what stance to take towards participation in these institutions, although we are clear in opposing the anti-democratic changes being championed and actually implemented by the right.
The Right is Waging a Frontal Attack on Liberal Democracy
This is the third post in the ‘Democracy and Populism’ series. In this post, I draw upon Donatella della Porta’s book ‘Can Democracy Be Saved?’ (Polity Press, 2013), more specifically on her concise review of the literature on liberal democracy in the first two chapters of that book. Della Porta has been the lead researcher on more empirically grounded studies of protest movements and policing of protests across Western Europe than any other person in the past several decades. Hence her theorizing about liberal democracy is very attentive to the most up to date facts about the attitudes and actions of people on both left and right in those countries.
There are multiple reasons why support for liberal democratic institutions is declining. In this post, I mainly restate three factors advanced by della Porta that have to do with very broad structural and institutional changes. You will have read about these changes before, especially the second and third ones. Most of the detailed explanation in this post is about the first, less often discussed, change. I rehearse them here because my argumentation in later posts about left and right populism, and about how the left can best defend and extend democracy, is partly grounded on recognizing them, and especially the ideological and political consequences of them.
The three factors spell out the basic structural changes that have greatly reshaped real existing liberal democracy into something different than we were used to dealing with as recently as four decades ago. Our strategies and tactics in relation to democracy have to be different in important ways to the extent that we are dealing with a different real existing liberal democracy. The three changes are: “[1] A shift of power from [political] parties (and representative institutions) to the executive [i.e. unelected bodies subject to the command of the President or Prime Minister]; [2] A shift of power from the nation states to international government organizations (IGOs) [like the WTO, IMF, G7]; [3] A shift in power from the state to the market, which also implies a shift from welfare state to warfare state” (della Porta, p24).
Power has Shifted Away from Elected Lawmakers and National Governments
None of these three causes of the delegitimation of liberal democracy are original, but that is precisely the value of highlighting them. Della Porta is summarizing three key components of what both scholars and political progressives can and do agree upon. We need to debate our differing ideas about real existing liberal democracy, and what to do to defend and extend democracy. We will not progress in that debate towards a more advanced and practical unity, unless we are explicit about our shared assumptions about the facts. We need a better concrete analysis of concrete conditions that starts with a recognition of those conditions, not a scholastic debate about democracy and liberalism in the transhistorical abstract.
POWER HAS SHIFTED FROM POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTED LEGISLATURES TO EXECUTIVE BODIES
The heyday of liberal democracy in the rich countries of the West was the relatively brief three decades period after the Second World War. It is not a coincidence that this is exactly the same period in which there was a new grand compromise (or social contract) between capital and labour. That compromise was mainly expressed by the creation of a welfare state that raised real living standards for the vast majority, and significantly increased opportunities for upward mobility, including by long discriminated against groups such as women and ethnic and racial minorities.
The Heyday of Liberal Democracy Ended Over Forty Years Ago
A key consequence of this was that a large majority of people felt that the government could act to enact policies that benefited them. This stimulated the creation and expansion of all sorts of popular (and anti-popular) organizations to formulate demands directed towards governments. But there had to be organizations that could take account of these demands, and reconcile clashing and competing interests, before presenting them to legislatures and other state bodies. There had to be political parties that could take the inputs from outside organizations (mostly elite ones for the right, mostly unions and other popular ones for the left) and then transform them into outputs in legislation and policy by government bodies.
Parliamentary political parties performed two crucial functions in making people believe that the institutions of liberal democracy could work for them. I will label them the ‘Accountability to the Voters’ function and the ‘Representation of Long-Term Interests’ function.
First, the Accountability to the Voter function. People believed that governments could work for them because they believed that there were at least two parties, or coalitions of parties, that could replace one another in power. Governments could be made accountable. If they did enough to accommodate people’s demands they could get re-elected. If they did not, they could be thrown out of office and replaced by the alternative party or parties. The voter had real power to change who was in government. The government was accountable to the voter.
Voters Used to Feel That They Could Vote Out a Bad Government and Elect a Good One
Of course, this only worked if throwing one government out for failing to respond positively enough to the claims and interests of that set of voters simultaneously elected an alternative group that went on to address enough of their concerns. It only worked if you had a left-leaning party (coalition) and a right-leaning one, hence differing in values and ideas, but who both had a more or less equal commitment to serving the vast majority of voters who were wage-earning working class or salaried middle middle class as well as women, minorities etc. Both had to work actively to uphold the labour-capital class compromise, the welfare state that redistributed at least some wealth, income and opportunity.
The right-leaning coalition would work to minimize it in favour of more ‘freedom’ for capital and resultant ‘growth’. The left-leaning coalition would work to strengthen and expand it in favour of more income for the wage and salary earners and more upward mobility for women, minorities, people born into low income families etc. What happens when the left-leaning party moves to the position previously occupied by the right-leaning one, and the right-leaning party moves to the hard right committed to tearing down the redistributive state in favour of a fully deregulated capitalism?
Voters Used to Believe that Their Party Would Stand Up for Their Long-Term Interests
The second function performed by political parties (most fully in rich Western countries) in the heyday of liberal democracy was the ‘Representation of Long-Term Interests’ one. Political scientists would term this the function of having a clear ‘collective identity’, of being clearly associated with looking out for the interests of a particular coalition of social groups and their objective interests first and foremost. This is really the same as saying that one coalition leaned left, and put the interests of the subordinated and disadvantaged ahead of the dominant social groups, and the other coalition leaned right. The second group’s pitch was that they were the same people whose entrepreneurship and superior knowledge and managerial skills ran the non-government economic and social institutions, and so were best qualified to run the government too.
The importance of this for the credibility of liberal democracy is that most people do not want to, and anyway only exceptionally do, take the time and energy to follow politics closely. Very few people work together with others to assess their long and short term interests, then figure out what policy solutions (claims) best serve those objective interests, and how their preferred policy options match up to the policies and actions of the rival parties.
When there are clearcut left-leaning and right-leaning parties sharing a commitment to maintaining a labour-capital compromise, most people are relieved of the necessity of doing all of that. They can trust that they know what the two party coalitions stand for, if not exactly in relation to short-term issues like whether to expand public spending and raise taxes or the opposite at any given moment, then at least in terms of what fundamental interests they will uphold. They can have faith that after they have voted for the party they identify with, their work is over, and they can focus on other things. Liberal democracy will serve them. More precisely, the party they voted for will serve them, will ‘represent’ them as if they were there in government themselves.
The Role of Citizens in a Liberal Democracy is to Vote and Rely on Their Party to ‘Represent’ Them
Almost as important, both sets of parties operate within a broad consensus on the limits of how far right or left any given government can swing. That consensus is set by the terms of the commitment to a somewhat redistributive welfare state capitalism, in which real living standards and economic opportunity are always getting at least a little bit better for most people over no worse than the medium term. This too allows most people to limit their active role in liberal democracy to periodic voting for parties to represent them because, even if their coalition loses and their opponents are in power, the arc of history will still bend ever so slightly towards justice, to things getting broadly better.
Liberal democracy at its peak of success did not feature much involvement by the vast majority in ‘deliberation’ (to assess interests and formulate policies), or in ‘participation’ in actual decision-making, or even in mobilizing to press governments to adopt specific policies and abandon others. It was a system that depended on parties that could ‘represent’.
The liberal democracy we have today is very different from the one that prevailed for the first thirty years after the Second World War. In della Porta’s summation of the consensus in the political science literature, it is one in which people’s trust in the ability of their political party to represent them, and their long-term interests and claims, has been decisively weakened. It is also one in which the power to actually elaborate policy ideas, decide upon laws and then implement and enforce them has been significantly shifted to the office of the President or Prime Minister and Cabinet (the executive branch), to state bodies run like corporations and to (quasi) judicial bodies. It is one in there has been a “shift of power from parties (and representative institutions) to the executive”.
Power has Shifted Decisively from Parties and Lawmakers to Prime Ministers and Presidents
This change accelerated and consolidated after Thatcher-Reagan established a new capital-labour compromise, or social contract, of globalized neoliberalism, of deregulated capitalism and ‘free trade’. The left-leaning parties (Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council in the USA and Tony Blair and New Labour in the UK) accepted the new consensus as what they called The Third Way. They still believed that government could be a force for good (while right-leaning parties became more aggressively anti-government). They believed that they could deliver a continuing welfare state. However, the new common sense was that this was only possible to the extent that neoliberal policies increased economic growth, and hence government revenues, without raising tax rates. It was only possible to the extent that governments lowered their cost of operation by being run like private capitalist enterprises and/or by subcontracting many of its functions to private companies.
This in turn required that the structure of decision-making in government became more like the structure of decision-making in private corporations. It required that governments be run by a top-down command structure of a Board of Directors and senior management, whose decision making was technocratic and meritocratic more than value and idea driven. It required a strong Executive state, where the relationship of the politicians and political parties who got elected to their citizen-voters was less one of ‘representing’ left versus right long-term interests than one of satisfying their ‘shareholders’.
One of the many myths about neoliberal capitalism is that it requires a weakened or smaller state (the rightwing parties are particularly shameless in promoting this canard), or one that is less directive or interventionist. In fact, it requires a more authoritarian and less democratic state that can be more responsive to the needs of ‘the market’, and can set and enforce strong rules for market players.
Professional Lobbyists and Social Movements have Replaced Parties in ‘Representing’ Interests and Policy Preferences
The nature of political parties in the liberal democracy of the last forty years has changed correspondingly. Political parties no longer play much of a role in engaging with ‘civil society’ (meaning with popular organizations and movements) and then reconciling and channeling the interests and claims of those diverse groups into the elected bodies of law-makers. Instead, for less powerful social groups and progressive causes, it falls increasingly on extraparliamentary social movement organizations to perform (the first half of) this function, namely articulating the long-term interests and short-term policy claims (but their impact on legislation is indirect and slight; their impact is only to the extent that they change public opinion). On the right, the functions of political parties have been taken over by lobbyists for the more powerful classes and social groups. There has been a vast expansion of lobbying and legislation-writing organizations, neoliberal and conservative ‘thinktanks’, and propaganda outlets like Fox News and partisan professional social media messaging groups.
Party members, even activists who attend conferences and do volunteer work during and between elections have little genuine influence on party policy or personnel. Their role is reduced to at most voting to pick the next party leader. They may vote for a set of policies at a conference, but it is likely to be ignored by their party’s election campaign and only moderately and diffusely influential on what the party does when in power. Party platforms for elections are based on the decision of the Party Leader and the political campaign professionals and polling data. The platforms and the campaign slogans are exercizes in marketing, pure and simple.
Once in power, the elected law-makers have little power except to follow the decision-making of the Party Leader and the Executive, which may or may not have much to do with the platform and slogans that won them the election. Yes elections are still contests between parties that have different social bases, and put forward differing ideological stances. However, the differences tend more and more to be over so-called ‘cultural issues’ (that mostly reduce to some form of status envy and the maintenance of a hierarchical difference between status groups) rather than socio-economic ones (at least this is what the right-wing parties often are successful in making the focus). Left and liberal parties do try to enact policies that are more pro welfare state, but they typically fail to deliver much actual expanding or strengthening of programmes that redistribute wealth, income and opportunity. They cannot do that and still operate a successful economy based on deregulated markets and free trade.
Political Parties Act Like Businesses Offering Competing Products for Individual Voter Consumers to Buy – Plus a Strong Leader with Charisma
The result of all these changes is that many voters tend to view all political parties, whether left-leaning or right-leaning, skeptically and transactionally. Identification with any political party is weaker and, for an increasing number, switchable. These voters ask: What do I (the consumer, or alternately, the shareholder investor) get for my money? They tend to look at parties and elected governments like an individual consumer (or investor) looks at competing companies and their brands of the same kind of product. In adopting this attitude,they are simply adapting to the reality of an Executive technocratic state, that operates along the lines of a private corporation, in order to serve the interests of maximizing economic growth achieved by free markets.
POWER HAS SHIFTED FROM NATION STATES TO INTERNATIONAL GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS
The second big structural change that has weakened the faith of the public in liberal democratic institutions is something we all think we know a lot about. It is what is usually referred to as globalization. It is the fact that free trade agreements and the like have legally constituted ‘rules-based’ international trading and investing and financial markets that are beyond the reach of decisions made by the elected governments of nation states. It is the power of what della Porta calls IGOs, or International Government Organizations, that arguably exceed the authority and power of all but the most powerful nation-states.
There are a large number of IGOs, but the key ones are well known – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the G7. In the 1970s and 1980s, these bodies started to dictate neoliberal Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) to previously colonized relatively poor countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Governments were required to implement extensive policies of liberalization, deregulation, privatization, free trade, reduction of welfare state services and reduction of tax rates on business. If they did not do this to the satisfaction of the IMF et al they would be unable to get IMF loans and thereby private market loans, or they would be otherwise sanctioned by runs on their currency, private company disinvestment and the like. In the 1990s, the formerly Marxist states of Eastern Europe had the same neoliberal SAP policies imposed on them. After the 2007-2008 financial crisis SAPs were imposed on the poorer countries in Western Europe like Greece directly. They were also enacted ‘voluntarily’ in the relatively rich West European states, in the form of austerity programmes imposed by their own nation state governments.
IGOs Dictate Policies of Privatization, Deregulation, Free Trade, Lower Business Taxes and Reduced Social Spending – Nation State Governments Get the Blame
I will defer further explanation of this change to a future post, where I will draw especially on an excellent recent book about the history of the Hayekian neoliberal intellectual movement by Quinn Slobodian titled Globalists (Harvard University Press, 2018).
The bottom line point about how globalization of neoliberal policies, through the creation of IGOs controlled by the United States and a handful of allied nation states, undermined the faith of people in their own national governments and liberal democratic institutions is this: it no longer made much difference what political party or parties you elected to be your national government, because they all ended up having to implement the policies that the international market and IGOs pressured them to enact.
Ironically, the undermining of the autonomy and authority of elected governments in nation states by rightwing neoliberal SAP policies has stimulated a shift in allegiance of many voters to support extreme ethnic nationalist policies. Those policies of ‘Make Our Nation Great Again’ are sold as the way to maintain the power and independence of the nation state and even (an authoritarian executive dominated form of) liberal democracy.
Both the extraparliamentary left and the left-leaning political parties (or at least their progressive wing) are equally ironically in a position where they favour a cosmopolitan internationalism (and for the left of the left an anti-imperialist and anti-IGO internationalism), but oppose neoliberal globalization and the SAP policies. Thusfar the right is winning the battle of public opinion. The left is unsure of how to articulate its position and mostly mobilizes to counter the reactionary nationalist policies of the right. The right populists frame the issues, and set the agenda of battle. The left is on the defensive. There is a danger that the left will eventually end up falling into a left version of populist nationalism (Much more on that later. I expect to argue that the left should stress anti-capitalism, while defending the interests of the citizens of all nation states equally – and that includes their own).
To Counter Populist Nationalism, the Left should Stress Anti-Capitalism while Defending the Interests of the Citizens of all Nation States Equally – including Their Own
Meanwhile, left or right, citizens/voters are losing confidence in the ability of a liberal democratic national government to protect them, because it is too weak and divided between social groups and political factions. Thusfar this mostly favours the ethnic nationalist right. They say that the solution is a liberal democracy reduced to rule by a Strong (elected, so still representatively democratic) Leader. They say that a strong enough nation state can only be one where the ‘people’, the ‘nation’, are united as one behind the Leader. They say a nation-serving democracy must limit the divisions fostered by an independent media, and frequent protests by a left-leaning set of social movements, and by a government where the power remains in the factionalized and polarized legislature that never seems to get anything done. This is still a liberal democracy, but a very different one from the liberal democracy of the thirty year period after World War Two.
POWER HAS SHIFTED FROM THE STATE TO THE MARKET
The third big change that undermines popular faith in the efficacy of liberal democracy is the shift from the moderate Keynesian social democratic welfare state policies of the three decades after the war to the neoliberal policies since 1979-80. This has already been spelled out above. It is in this sense only that there has been a shift ‘from the state to the market’. As already noted, the neoliberal era state has not been reduced in size, far from it. Rather it is the democratic parts of the nation state that have tended to be weakened, while the parts of the state that provide services and enforcement for private businesses are expanded. The main trendline has been a reduction in the quantity and quality of redistributive services to citizens, and an expansion in services to businesses (including, as della Porta implies, an expansion of spending on warfare to open up new markets for their country’s businesses).
‘Government’ is seen as Taking Away Jobs, Income, Pensions, Social Services, Union Rights – IGOs and Private Businesses Get a Pass
How is this assertion of an expanded and stronger pro-market Executive State squared with the second point about the trend to nation state governments becoming weaker? Well, they are becoming weaker in relation to ‘international markets’ and the dictates of the major IGOs. Nation state governments are increasingly rule-takers in relation to them. The direct result of this weakening is that nation state governments must expand their coercive and democracy-reducing roles as rule givers (or transmitters) to their own citizens, as they strictly enforce the SAP austerity policies.
Governments are seen to take away jobs, income, union rights, pensions, social services etc from their own citizens. Private businesses are seen to be job creators. Public services are worse and skimpier, in part because of the increased role of private companies and private corporation logics in delivering those services, but it is politicians and government bureaucracy that are mostly blamed, not ‘the market’. Foreign forces are also blamed, but the right has been successful in shifting the blame away from international big business and IGOs to immigrants stealing jobs and George Soros style banker conspiracies. And their own country’s big businesses get an even more totally uncritical free pass. To the extent that the neoliberal consensus promoted by both left and right parties endlessly sells the idea that ‘[too much] government is bad, business is good’, support for democratic government is undermined.
The Left can Distinguish Itself by Opposing Concentration and Centralization of Power in both Big Business and the Executive State
As I said in the intro, you already knew most of this. But it is important to keep these three causes of the loss of trust in liberal democracy in mind, as we look at a range of issues about what the left can and should do about it, in the continuing series of posts on ‘Democracy and Populism’.