Joshua Paschal

I want to shift away from the plain and ordinary politics of the election to a more general (and more philosophical) argument. How does democracy end? To be clear, I am talking about contemporary, representative, liberal democracies, not anything we can call a ‘democracy’. While democracies can obviously end due to direct and obvious coup or due to civil war or due to foreign intervention, I want to argue that the most plausible way democracies end in the Western world is through democratic slippage.

Ordinarily, we think of democracy as a massive competition of many, many competing interests, especially here in the United States. Millions upon millions of people have a blend of interest and choose which issues matter to them and how much those issues matter. Through the processes of elections and politics, collective decisions are made via which pluralities emerge for which issues and how successfully those pluralities navigate the political sphere. At least, that’s the basic story: procedural issues like disproportionate influence via, say, voter suppression, of course, emerge and should be actively addressed. These issues, however, are insufficient for us to declare the end of democracy. What more is needed is for the democracy to slip into illiberalism.

The story of slippage goes like this: a group or individual runs for office on a platform that invigorates a certain bloc. That bloc likely existed before, but the key here is the level of invigoration and commitment the bloc ends up consumed by. This is not to say voters should not be enthusiastic about their politics, but the key here is that the voting bloc’s level of enthusiasm begins to undermine public reason. Pluralism and fair competition go out the window, and “at all cost” politics begins to rear its head. At this point, democracy has slipped into ‘populism’. The most obvious example of this is the fervent anti-immigrant position of the current administrations of Poland, Hungary, and Italy adopted in wake of the refugee crisis. ‘Populism’ need not be reactionary, but it usually is.

Some may protest at this point and accuse me of framing some right-wing movements disingenuously. That objection, however, is the result of historical contingencies. Populism in this sense has persisted throughout history, but has not always been so typically right-wing in its positions as it presently tends to be. For every Know-Nothing nativist in American history, there was also, often, a patchwork populist labor movement (the right-wing movements, it should be noted, have been historically far more influential in the United States particularly). But this is likewise a contingency, as cross-culturally there are clear counter-examples: most obviously, the emergence of mass-movement communist revolutions in the early 20th century (one should note, however, these were not in response to democracies at all).

The real danger, however, is when populism goes a step further. While I believe ‘authoritarianism’ is a crude and unspecific term at times, authoritarianism is nonetheless the danger of populism. “At all cost” populism begins to decay the procedures that protect and represent the pluralism of a liberal democracy. Legislative chambers begin to push out more laws at faster rates, usually with less deliberation and with less legislative care or nuance. The law must be passed and must be passed now, not later.

As the law is accelerated, so too do majorities and cooperation wither. Laws are passed by the slimmest of margins possible: “at all costs!” it is declared.

Then comes the next election. One of two things happens: someone wins or that same someone loses. More specifically, the ‘populists’ win or lose their next challenge. In the case they win, they then consider the ‘at all costs!” declaration as vilified, and begin to double-down on their public sanction. The tyranny of the majority (or plurality) begins to be realized. Alternatively, they lose, but then the move is to declare fraud! Surely they are the most popular, they are the populists after-all! Elections are no longer trusted, and it falls upon the legal sphere of that society to go one way or the other. In the case of slipping into authoritarianism, the courts are corrupted by the previous administration(s) and so support the crying wolf: the populists are vilified by law instead of by vote, but still vilified nonetheless (alternatively, the group could also just usurp the courts, but that would just be a direct coup at that point).

And so, one unified bloc comes to dominate the politics for everyone else. Not only do they dictate policy, but they also begin to dictate discourse. Not only do they select which issues get discussed, they begin to say what can and cannot be said, often by law. In the case of Russia, for example, it no longer becomes acceptable to speak of the queer: not simply in the sense of norms but in the sense of penalty by law. Liberal democracy, at this point, is dead: and in its place is illiberalism. Democracy is reduced to the process, not the substance, and the legislative chambers become little more than rubber stamps for an agenda already decided.

Then, authority is all that matters. Might makes right: popular sovereignty be damned.