Democracy is dying – and it’s startling how few people are worried. By Paul Mason
A rough inventory of
July’s contribution to the global collapse of democracy would include Turkey’s show trial of leading journalists from Cumhuriyet, a
major newspaper; Vladimir
Putin’s ban on the virtual private networks used by democracy activists to
evade censorship; Apple’s decision
to pull the selfsame technology from its Chinese app store.
Then there is
Hungary’s government-funded poster campaign depicting opposition
parties and NGOs as puppets of Jewish billionaire George Soros; Poland’s
evisceration of judicial independence and the presidential veto that stopped it. Plus Venezuela’s constituent assembly poll, boycotted by more than half the
population amid incipient civil war. Overshadowing all this
is a three-cornered US constitutional face-off between Trump (accused of links
with Russia), his attorney general (who barred himself from investigating the
Russian links) and the special prosecutor who is investigating Trump, whom
Trump is trying to sack.
Let’s be brutal:
democracy is dying. And the most startling thing is how few ordinary people are
worried about it. Instead we compartmentalise the problem. Americans worried
about the present situation typically worry about Trump – not the pliability of
the most fetishised constitution in the world to kleptocratic rule. EU
politicians express polite diplomatic displeasure, as Erdoğan’s AK party
machine attempts to degrade their own democracies. As in the early 1930s, the
death of democracy always seems to be happening somewhere else.
The problem is it sets
new norms of behaviour. It is no accident that the “enemies of the people” meme
is doing the rounds: Orbán uses it against the billionaire George Soros, Trump
uses it against the liberal press, China used it to jail the poet Liu Xiaobo
and keep him in prison until his death.
Another popular
technique is the micromanaged enforcement of non-dissent. Erdoğan not only
sacked tens of thousands of dissenting academics, and jailed some, but removed their social security rights, revoked their rights to
teach, and in some cases to travel. Trump is engaged in a similar micromanagerial attack on so called “sanctuary cities”. About 300
US local governments have pledged – entirely legally – not to collaborate with
the federal immigration agency ICE. Last week the US attorney general Jeff
Sessions threatened federal grants to these cities’ local justice systems,
a move Trump hailed using yet another fashionable technique – the unverified
claim.
Trump told a rally of supporters in Ohiothat the federal government was
in fact “liberating” American cities from immigrant crime gangs. They “take a
young, beautiful girl, 16, 15 and others and they slice them and dice them with
a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they
die”, he said. At school – and I mean primary school – we were taught to greet
such claims about racial minorities with the question: “Really? When and where
did this happen?” Trump cited no evidence – though the US press managed to find
examples in which gang members had indeed hacked each other.
This repertoire of
autocratic rule is of course not new; what makes it novel is its concerted and
combined use by elected rulers – Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán, Trump, Maduro, Duterte
in the Philippines and Modi in India – who are quite clearly engaged in a
rapid, purposive and common project to hollow out democracy. Equally striking is
that, right now, there is no major country prepared to set positive global
standards for democracy.
In her 2015 book,
Undoing the Demos, UC Berkeley political science professor Wendy Brown made a
convincing case that the world’s backsliding on democratic values has been
driven by its adoption of neoliberal economics. It is not, argues
Brown, that freemarket elites purposefully embrace the project of autocracy,
but that the economic microstructures created in the last 30 years
“transmogrify every human domain and endeavour, including humans themselves,
according to a specific image of the economic”. All action is judged as if it
has an economic outcome: free speech, education, political participation. We
learn implicitly to weigh what should be principles as if they were
commodities. We ask: is it “worth” allowing some cities to protect illegal
migrants? What is the economic downside of sacking tens of thousands of
academics and dictating what they can research?
In his influential
2010 testament, Indignez-Vous (Time for Outrage!), the French resistance
fighter Stéphane Hessel urged the rising generation of social justice activists
to remember the fight he and others had put up during the drafting of the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They fought for the word universal (not
“international” as proposed by the main governments) in the full knowledge that
arguments about sovereignty would sooner or later be advanced to deny the
rights they thought they had secured. It seemed odd, back then, even to those
of us sympathetic to Hessel, to receive this long, repetitive lecture about the
concept of universality. But he was prescient. The tragedy today is
that there is not a single democratic government on Earth prepared to defend
that principle... read more:
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