The Rise And Fall Of Democracy

Opinion (Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, permanent fellow at the IWM Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, the author of In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders?):“The paradox of the modern world is that the democratization of society has ironically led to voters’ loss of power and the rise of social inequality while globalization liberated the elites but deprived them of legitimacy and capacity to govern.

“Today elected governments run the majority of states in the world. … Democratic ideal reigns uncontested and the will of the people expressed in free and fair elections is accepted to be the only real source of legitimate power. In the 21^st century democracy has dispensed with most of its critics but, unfortunately, none of its internal contradictions.

“Democratic ideal reigns uncontested and the will of the people expressed in free and fair elections is accepted to be the only real source of legitimate power. … democracy and good governance can coexist only under a regime of limited suffrage. In their view the real sovereign is not the people, but reason. So, voting should be discussed in terms of capacities rather than rights. In the 19^th century, capacity was translated as property or education; only those with the right education or enough property could be entrusted with the power to vote. …

“While we all agree that democracy means we should be able to influence decisions which affect us, in reality this is not the case. We are frequently consumers of decisions made by governments we have not elected. In a globalized world we depend more than ever on the decisions of others, those who never were and never will be part of our community. And therefore there is a natural urge to make sure that those others do not make the wrong choices. Truth be told, democracy was never that great at preventing people from making mistakes. …

“So, instead of choosing between sovereign democracy, globalized democracy, or globalization-friendly authoritarianism, political elites try to redefine democracy and sovereignty in order to make the impossible possible. The outcome is democracies without choices, sovereignty without meaning, and globalization without legitimacy. …

“While democracy treats individuals as equal (every adult has an equal vote), free enterprise empowers individuals on the basis of how much economic value they create and how much property they own. … Voters can decide who will be in government – their votes still ‘choose’ the winning party, while markets decide what will be the economic policy of the government, irrespective of who wins the elections. …

“The problem is that this unstoppable spread of democracy has both destroyed the borders between the different spheres of human activity – those which should be run by vote and those which should be run by professional competence, and at the same time de-legitimized the popular elected democratic institutions. …

“The logical consequences of such attitudes are, on the one hand, the secular trend of decline of electoral turnout in most Western democracies, and on the other hand, the tendency where people least likely to vote are the poor, unemployed, and the youth, in short those who in theory should be most interested in using the political system to change their lot.

“So, the paradoxical outcome of the expansion of democratic principle of self-governance outside of the political realm is that now that we vote on everything, the political power of the voter has declined. …

“In the days of national democracies, the citizen voter was powerful because he was at the same time a citizen-soldier, citizen-worker, and citizen-consumer. The citizen-soldier was important because the defense of the country depended on his courage to stand against the enemies. The citizen-worker was important because his work was making the country rich. And the citizen-consumer mattered because his consumption was driving the economy. But when drones and professional armies replace the citizen-soldier, one of the major motives of the elite’s interest in public welfare is substantially weakened. The flooding of the labor market by low-cost immigrants as well as outsourced production have also reduced elites’ willingness to take into account citizens’ interests and opinions. The fact that over the course of the recent economic crisis it became evident that the performance of the U.S. stock market no longer depended on the consumer power of the Americans is one more argument why citizens are losing their leverage over the ruling groups. It is the decline of the leverage of the citizen-soldier, the citizen-consumer, and the citizen-worker that explains voters’ loss of power but also the growing ungovernability of modern democracies.”

My Comment: People’s participation today means thousands of demonstrators on the streets who reject government decisions. In the future, the quality of governing will be determined by the opportunity to turn protest movements into coherent positive demands and structured political force. This will be possible through the implementation of integral education for the masses. In this case, they will be able to realize the changes that must be made in society.
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