With the rise of authoritarian leaders across the world, there’s been a rush of books taking a deeper look at democracy as we know it. In his new book, The People vs. Democracy (2018), Harvard lecturer Yascha Mounk argues, “Citizens have long been disillusioned with politics; now, they have grown restless, angry, even disdainful.”
From Russia and Turkey to Poland and Hungary, “elected strongmen” are turning democracies into electoral dictatorships and using the same “playbook to destroy the free media, to undermine independent institutions and to muzzle the opposition”. Given this scenario, in How Democracy Ends (2018), Cambridge professor David Runciman says he is “thinking the unthinkable”: “Barely two decades into the twenty-first century, and almost from nowhere the question is upon us: is this how democracy ends?”
Starting from America, Runciman calls out the overheated political climate in many places — “increasingly unstable, riven with mistrust and mutual intolerance, fuelled by wild accusations and online bullying, a dialogue of the deaf drowning each other out with noise.” Is democracy starting to look unhinged? He organises his book around three themes: coup, catastrophe, and technological takeover. It’s particularly eerie to read about technology “that promises greater efficiency than anything we’ve ever seen before, controlled by corporations that are less accountable than any in modern political history.”
In his 2017 book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism , Edward Luce notes Russia and other countries’ “hostility to western notions of progress” and tries to answer the question, are they wrong? America vehemently condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, but the U.S. did the same in Iraq. Luce argues that the most mortal threat to the Western idea of progress is from within — “the backlash of the West’s middle classes, who are the biggest losers in a global economy that has been rapidly converging, but still has decades to go.” Luce says this sentiment of the “left-behinds” has been brewing since the early 1990s. Mounk, too, points at the growing uneasiness of large sections of people with established systems.
What’s the way forward? Timothy Snyder, in On Tyranny (2017), presents 20 lessons from the 20th century adapted to the circumstances of today. But some of them — believe in truth, be calm when the unthinkable arrives, and be as courageous as you can — are becoming increasingly hard to follow.
