Sphinx

How does democracy die, and can the process be stopped? It’s a pressing question at the moment, not only in the United States – the focus of Levitsky & Ziblatt’s new book, How Democracies Die – but across much if not most of the rest of the world, from South Africa to Germany to India, and even at a more local level, such as the steady marginalisation of all but a tiny clique in the management of universities, despite them still being presented as communities of teaching and scholarship – the reason why I’m writing this blog post when I would normally be talking about such issues in the context of Thucydides and his account of the crisis of Athenian democracy with my students.

It’s a shame, then, that a book with the subtitle “What history reveals about our future” is so lacking in historical perspective. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s discussion extends back to the foundation of the United States when it suits them, but their choice of examples of failing democracies extends barely eighty years into the past, with the inevitable examples of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy in the 1930s, and they clearly feel much more comfortable with the recent history of South America as their core warehouse of analogies. It doesn’t help that their sole engagement with the issue of defining democracy comes right at the very end, and consists solely of quoting E.B. White’s answer to the question in 1943, including the helpful transcultural principle that it’s “the score at the beginning of the ninth”. That this is considered to be all the definition that’s required is a clear indication that they don’t perceive any actual problem; that is, as far as their analysis is concerned the United States is the epitome of democracy, democracy means the US constitution, and other states are democracies insofar as they resemble the US. This may explain why their one excursion into an earlier period of history takes them to the conflict between Charles I and the English Parliament, not anyone else’s obvious example of a democratic system.

It’s difficult not to feel that this is less a serious comparative study of the historical experience of democracies than the rhetorical deployment of some historical examples that happen to fit the general principles they’ve already developed; to be charitable, we could accept that those principles were derived from recent Latin American history rather than just from abstract theorising, but that still means the book’s subtitle is distinctly misleading. It’s the invocation of ‘history’ as a signifier of reality and objectivity: this isn’t some theory we’ve just made up, it’s What Really Happened (and, if it happened once, it can happen again…). Examples of democracies that don’t fit the implicit model (like classical Athens) aren’t welcome; likewise alternative interpretations of developments in 1930s Europe, because the point of such analogical thinking is that the past is assumed to be known and understood, hence capable of serving as the basis for predictions about an unknown future. Too much history, and too much historical debate, would be a distraction.

But the fact that Levitsky & Ziblatt don’t feel inclined to engage with ancient history doesn’t mean that we can’t take their general claims and see how far they work in a different context. Let’s assume for the moment that Athenian popular democracy has enough in common with modern conceptions to make a comparison at least faintly, potentially enlightening – the idea that the majority, not a single person or a small clique, should have a meaningful say in government, for example – and consider whether the crisis of Athenian democratic institutions from winter 412/11 to summer 411/10 (the period involving the rule of the 400, as narrated in Thucydides 8.47-97) fits the model.

A couple of themes that echo L & Z certainly stand out. We might take it as read that part of the background to the oligarchic coup in Athens was increasing polarisation of the citizen body and the erosion of norms of discourse and political behaviour – Thucydides’ most detailed account of such factionalism focuses of course on Corcyra (3.82-3), but it’s presented as a case study and precursor of similar developments in other cities rather than as a one-off in unique circumstances, and there are clear indications in several set-piece debates in Athens, especially the Sicilian Debate, that similar tendencies towards factional conflict, extreme rhetoric and bad faith had developed as depicted in the earlier episode, the epitome of polarised politics:

Their factions were not dedicated to collective well-being under established laws but to undermining the law for their own selfish advantage. The strength of their bonds with one another were less a matter of trust and friendship than on their common involvement in a criminal cause. If their opponents made reasonable proposals, they responded, when they felt themselves in a position of strength, with defensive counter-measures rather than generously accepting them. To get revenge on someone mattered more than not being hurt in the first place. If they ever agreed on reconciliation, this was only considered binding for the time being, as each side only agreed to reconcile with its opponents when they felt they had no other option and no other source of power; but when the opportunity arose, each sought to strike first…

The less intelligent were the ones who often came out on top. They were afraid that, because of their own shortcomings and the cleverness of their opponents, they might be defeated in any rational argument and be caught unawares by plans being hatched against them. They therefore committed themselves boldly to action, while those who complacently assumed that they could foresee developments in advance, so there was no need to secure by action what would be attained through proper analysis of the situation – they were taken off-guard and destroyed.

(Thucydides 3.82.6-7, 3.83.3-4, adapted from Mynott)

Secondly, there’s the role of crisis in precipitating this attack on democracy – which is then presented as a legitimate response to the threats faced by the city, that can be reversed at any time once the danger has passed. What chance does Athens have, argues Peisander, “unless we stop consulting more about our constitution than about our salvation in the present situation (we can always make some changes later if there is anything we don’t like).” Thucydides presents the Athenian people as giving in reluctantly, “partly in fear and partly in the hope that things could be changed later”. It’s worth noting the importance of the argument that accepting this political change is a necessary prerequisite for obtaining aid from outside, specifically Alcibiades and the Persians; this isn’t relevant to the US, of course, but it does rather resemble certain Latin American coups, where the expectation of US aid for a less democratic and/or socialist government was an important factor in precipitating coups.

Thirdly, in Athens we see the gradual erosion of democratic norms and subversion of democratic institutions, rather than their immediate and public overthrow, just as L & Z argue is almost always the case in modern times: the claim that the change has been the relatively minor one of limiting power to 5,000 reasonably well-to-do citizens (the comfortable middle class that has, historically, shown a certain receptiveness to more authoritarian rule) rather than the shift to an oligarchy of 400 that had actually taken place; the continuation of meetings of the Assembly and of Boule until a later stage, even if (as Thucydides notes) they actually conducted only the business agreed by the conspirators. Fourthly, we see a growing campaign of targeted assassination and intimidation, directed at those perceived as offering the biggest threat to the new regime because of their popularity, eloquence and/or known sympathies.

Those are the obvious parallels with the L & Z model; what of the differences? The crucial one is the amount of time Thucydides takes to discuss the thoughts and reactions of the mass of the citizens, as well as the political machinations of the conspirators and other oligarchs. It’s clear that the question of why the people, or a substantial proportion of them, were willing to acquiesce in the degeneration of democratic norms and institutions is a central one for him, and he explores the range of factors that either promoted sympathy for the coup (resentment on the part of the well-to-do hoplite class against those who receive payments from the state) or silenced objections (uncertainty about what was happening or who was actually involved, hence fear of being identified as an opponent of the regime, and the constant background of rumour and concern about external events).

The story of how democracy dies is surely, at least in part, the story of how the mass of the people allow it to die, rather than just being a story of a few evil men seizing control; how democracy loses (some of its) legitimacy, not just how it’s undermined and corrupted – but this isn’t the story that L & Z want to tell. Either because the US system is designed as a representative democracy rather than a popular democracy, or because this is their conception of politics in general, they focus their analysis on the professional politicians, whether the potential autocrats or the established representatives, rather than on the citizens more generally. Far from engaging with the sorts of issues considered in Colin Crouch’s work on post-democracy, they offer reassuring comments about the low level of support enjoyed by the Nazis until a few foolish gatekeepers made the mistake of allowing Hitler access to power and legitimacy.

This isn’t a matter of the historical fact that Athens didn’t have organised political parties, for example, so that they couldn’t serve the gate-keeping functions that L & Z identify as important in the US tradition – in other words, that a concentration on the activities of the elite politicians is what makes sense in the US context. It’s the fact that the Athenian dislike of organised factions, such that they designed their political institutions to limit their influence, was because they regarded them as incompatible with democracy, whereas L & Z’s conception of democracy is basically undemocratic. This is something that they tacitly (perhaps unconsciously) admit, remarking on the tension between a system in which party elites work to exclude candidates who might be popular in the wrong sort of way, and the ideals of democracy – but then happily carry on talking about such gate-keeping as essential to protect democracy from authoritarianism.

Suddenly the fact that L & Z limit the definition of ‘democracy’ in their book to the E.B. White passage about civility makes perfect sense; it’s not just that the norms of democratic discourse and the proper operation of political institutions are in their view essential for the safeguarding of democracy, these norms and institutions are treated as if they constitute democracy – or at least, in the context of a United States of America that is treated without question as “one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies”, as if nothing else needs to be discussed. Further: their analysis constantly presents a binary choice between democracy (hurrah!) and authoritarianism (boo!) – so that everything that is not yet sliding into authoritarianism is assumed to be democratic.

But clearly that isn’t the case, as any Athenian could tell them. The ‘death’ of Athenian democracy was not the rise of a single authoritarian leader (and his cabal, though L & Z focus on Trump to the almost complete exclusion of the people around him); it was the establishment of an oligarchy. From an Athenian perspective, one might suggest, American democracy in L & Z’s account is already not democratic, always already oligarchic, and deliberately so – but they are unaware of this, and hence cannot but remain oblivious to the possibility that democracy can die in different ways besides the trajectory they claim to have identified in their modern examples.

Is democracy inherently fragile? L & Z’s account implies that it is, since it has to be made at least partly undemocratic (by transferring as much power as possible out of the hands of the mass of the population over to gate-keepers, institutions and behavioural norms) in order to stop it becoming thoroughly undemocratic. Thucydides is more optimistic, in his own pessimistic way, emphasising the combination of external circumstances, deliberate machinations and the carefully judged exercise of fear and violence that was required to persuade the Athenians to abandon their cherished ideals and freedom. And this is surely a more useful perspective, to study the present as well as the past – unless we accept that L & Z’s view of the US as essentially oligarchic from the beginning (even if that’s not how they think they see things) is actually true.

Postscript And what of USS and the management of UK universities more generally? We see the gradual erosion of common norms (the growing divide between the academics and professional staff on one side, the highly-paid top managers on the other); the exclusion of the mass of the employees from power on the grounds of efficiency and expertise, and in response to external threats, with the growing authoritarianism of the management; the reduction of traditional institutions like university senates to merely consultative roles, with all business decided by the executive; the use of coercive rhetoric (“there is no alternative, and we can always change things back at a later date”); the tendency of most people to prefer a quiet life until it’s too late…

Steven Levinsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: what history reveals about our future (Viking Press, 2018)