Democracy: fire or slow decay?

Populism is only one of two trends eating away at democracy

It’s hardly surprising that people are concerned about the state of democracy. Western democracies’ performance in the pandemic has been variable at best. The rising world superpower is a one-party state. And the measurers tell us there is a “democratic recession” around the world, with countries slipping from democracy into the partially-free, maybe-kind-of-democratic grey zone and from the grey zone into autocracy. Recently several pessimistic books have analysed the state we are in – books like Tim Snyder’s On Tyranny, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die or David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends.

These books worry that democracy will die by fire. A populist autocrat who doesn’t play by the rules will burn down established institutions. Tim Snyder draws from his historical stamping ground, the early twentieth century; Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book starts with the image of Mussolini’s March on Rome. Their more recent examples include Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Alberto Fujimori in Peru.

Well, yes. Events like these make up the democratic recession, as measured at Freedom House and elsewhere. There are several contemporary examples of fire’s progress through democratic institutions: Hungary, alight in several places; Turkey, an inferno; Russia in smouldering cinders. As populists like Trump drop their cigar stubs on the carpet, what else should we expect?

Democracy can also die, as Leonard Cohen put it, by very slow decay. This has received less attention. It goes like this.

First, democratic legislatures and executives are infested with professional politicians. (Greeting card joke: politics, from the Greek poly, “many”, and tics, “annoying little bloodsuckers”.) These bugs lack foresight, blindly follow the crowd, and have no incentive to care for the long-term health of the host body. Electorates think they’re gross. Legislatures become mired in antagonism and can’t cooperate to get things done. Elected executives win by cheap populism, which makes them particularly repugnant to elites.

Next, the body politic reacts by walling off the infected area. To avoid short-termism and amateurism, real power is hived off to career bureaucrats. In parallel, democratic decisions become increasingly subject to legal challenge. Judges and bureaucrats start to be the real decision-makers. Imperceptibly they gain authority.

This process, too, is already happening. It has got less publicity than the dramatic fires in Hungary and elsewhere. But we know that trust in politicians has been declining for decades. Democracy’s problem with short-termism is a cliché. In the US, Congress is no longer capable of performing basic tasks, like passing the annual budget on time. (Balancing it? Hah.) In a small political science literature, the disease has a technical name: depoliticization.

The best-known takeover of democratic decision-making by expert bureaucrats is monetary policy, which is now decided by independent central banks in most developed countries. The motivation was explicitly to get policy out of the irresponsible hands of politicians. The justification was that monetary policy was not just technocratic but bland. It didn’t pit different sections of the populace against one another. Everyone had an interest in sound money. This claim was always questionable, and since the Great Financial Crisis it has been falsified. Central bankers have introduced increasingly creative policies to restoke the economy with interest rates at or near the Zero Lower Bound. In 2020 the US Fed started buying low-grade corporate bonds. It now owns several billion dollars worth. Obviously, that is not a politically innocuous decision. The president of the Atlanta Fed recently suggested it could have a role in tackling racial inequality.

This is not a corrupt backroom takeover. Since 2008, central bankers have been begging governments to do more in the way of fiscal stimulus, and have taken over this role faute de mieux. They see themselves as well-intentioned experts. But power pushes you into the political limelight. Small retail options traders call Jerome Powell “Papa JPow”, because they believe his monetary policy is propping up their risky trades.

The argument that monetary policy is technical is discredited. Some political theorists have suggested bringing it back under democratic control. But mass support for that idea is rare today, and if it develops, it will probably come from free-money populists – just the people elites don’t want in charge. It is more likely that bankers will become more responsive to public opinion, but without the yoke of elections.

We can picture the endpoint of this process. Democratic institutions still exist, but they’re necrotic. Elected politicians waste their time on popular trivialities, banning dangerous dog breeds or introducing tougher punishments for paedophiles. Real policy is left to the experts. This looks a bit like the EU, where bureaucrats make the policies and the parliament rubber-stamps them. But at least real decision power in the EU still comes from elected heads of state. A better example would be the pre-1918 German Reichstag, which could veto legislation. Even that institution worked against a background of rising democracy, and increasingly felt and acted like a power in the land. Legislatures undergoing decay will go in the opposite direction.

These two possible deaths of democracy, by fire and by slow decay, seem opposed. One comes from populism, one from the liberal reaction to populism. But in fact they may help each other on. The danger and vulgarity of populist fire-starters fuels the contempt of elites. Conversely, out-of-touch bureaucrats can provide tinder for the populist fire. Rotten wood can burn fast.

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