January 6 and the fraying of democracy

Autocrats are never ones for false modesty. As the curtain rose on the televised House select committee hearings investigating the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2020 Donald Trump declared the insurrection to be “the greatest movement in the history of our country.”

Trump continues to claim that the 2020 Presidential election, which saw him unseated in favour of Joe Biden, was “stolen”. He has yet to present a shred of evidence to back up this claim. Nevertheless millions of his supporters believe him. The first overt attack on America’s 233-year democracy may not be the last.

On this side of the pond, attempts to suborn the checks and balances that bind our unwritten constitution by a Prime Minister clinging to power with his fingernails are subtler but no less insidious. Boris Johnson’s habit of breaking the rules he writes and then rewriting them to suit himself eats away at the trust that binds us a nation.

Democracy is looking distinctly peaky. It is not on its deathbed — yet. But it is far from being in rude health. Its oxygen levels are falling: voter turnout across the democratic world in the 1950s was around 85%. By the 1960s this had fallen to 77%. These days it’s nearer 66%.

As the events on January 6 demonstrated, alienated voters find other outlets for their grievances — populists on the far right, zealots on the far left. Direct action becomes a substitute for dialogue.

Perhaps more seriously many give up on the ballot box entirely and turn, instead, to social media. Wrapped in a vast, global echo chamber, often funded by dark money and shadowy state actors, the disenfranchised and the disillusioned get their sugar high.

Democracy’s weakening pulse rate has been aggravated by a broader attack on the very idea of truth: not truth as in “What is truth?” (This is not a philosophical problem). The attack is on simple facts, the building bricks of dialogue on which we need to agree if we are to address our common challenges.

If a sizeable chunk of the population believes their votes were stolen or that Brexit was pushed over the line by Russian-funded dirty tricks, then this complex, fragile, unsatisfactory thing we call democracy begins to fray at the seams.

The irony is that more democracy — or more voices ebbing and flowing in a world without boundaries — has unmoored our politics by exposing every laptop and cellphone on the planet to subversion.

Post-imperial democracies have struggled with two central challenges: how do you ensure that a rising tide lifts all boats — how do you level up? The second challenge is how to make parliamentary democracy genuinely participative. These two ideas are co-dependant.

If voters don’t feel that politicians have their backs, or if they feel ignored, if democracy doesn’t deliver, then it’s pointless. Benito Mussolini in 1932 said that liberal democracy was destined to perish. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said it’s on its last legs. To drive the point home he invaded Crimea, which he annexed, and is now slaughtering the innocents in Ukraine.

The last half of the 20th century was the golden age of democracy. In 1945 there were perhaps a dozen or so proper democracies in the world. By the end of the last century there were nearly 90. Then came the great reversal.

The immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the pandemic saw a marked fall in democratic norms and a rise in support for authoritarian alternatives or as we call it coyly, the smack of firm government.

In 2016 the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index downgraded the US from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy”. The UK sits at the bottom of the “full democracy” index just above Mauritius, Austria and Costa Rica. Attempts to undermine the judiciary, make it harder to vote and neuter the Electoral Commission are unlikely to improve its rankings.

Democracy is hard work. It requires us to respect those with different views or people who don’t look like us. It asks the citizen to sift through torrents of information, weeding out the dodgy from the good, the true from the false. In the era of fast news and fake news that’s hard.

There is no fixed definition of democracy. That’s the point. It is, by its very nature, a contest of ideas. But what we have now is shop worn. The two-party system, which served us well in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War when issues were more clear-cut and society less complex, needs rethinking.

One of the lessons of the past eight years is that the cult of personality and a transparent, capable government coupled to strong civil society don’t go together. A government that is held together by the force of a leader’s personality, as opposed to their ideas or their wisdom is inherently unstable. Governing requires discipline, logic and the ability to listen.

As the historian Peter Hennessy says, Britain’s constitution is a state of mind. To make it work we need to be in the right state of mind.

What is to be done? Proportional Representation may or may not be the answer. But it’s worth a long hard look. When so many people feel politically homeless, perhaps it’s time to enlarge the tent.

A great deal is at stake. Free markets, the engine of growth, cannot function properly without a stable, transparent, capable and dependable government. But free markets, as we have been made painfully aware by the collapse in energy markets, cannot be left to their own devices.

The lives of people mired in a cycle of poverty cannot and will not be changed by a government that represents at best half the voting population. Who speaks for the food bank citizen or, for that matter, the despairing green activist who glues themselves to the railings of a BP refinery?

Democracy nearly died before in the 1930s when markets crashed, inflation spiralled out of control, entire populations faced a cost of living crisis and the drumbeat of war was growing louder egged on by autocrats.

It mustn’t happen again. But it will. Democracy is an inconvenience to autocrats. To the rest of us it’s life itself.

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