Colin Crouch - Post-Democracy After the Crises

The idea of liberal democracy is related to that of representation, but the two things are by no means the same. Liberalism as most broadly conceived means acceptance that human knowledge is fundamentally uncertain, and that even firmly held beliefs might prove to be wrong. Liberalism is therefore tolerant of diversity and of approaches with which one is not personally sympathetic, because one can never be certain that knowledge and understanding will not change. Liberals are entitled to be intolerant of intolerance and of unquestioned beliefs, but not of much else. They might hold religious or political beliefs themselves, but they will never be so convinced that theirs are correct that they have a right to suppress those holding different ones. In economic terms they have a general preference for markets over central state planning, as the former contain more possibilities for flexibility and adjustment. Science is, or should be, liberal, in the sense that, while knowledge has to be accepted and used, one must always be ready for currently accepted truths to be found wrong or at least capable of being improved on. Liberalism rejects the imposition from above of unchallenged rule; it insists on debate and the constant possibility of challenge to authority. Of course, from time to time irreversible decisions have to be made, and the risk taken that they will prove to have been poor ones. But the scope for revision and changing views must be maintained as much as possible. For example, an irreversible decision may have to be taken to build a new motorway; but general road-building strategy for the future must continue to be discussed. It is fundamental to liberalism that no governing regimes are permanent. There must always be debate, and the certainty of new elections every few years. Today’s minority must stand a chance of becoming tomorrow’s majority; a party in government today must see a serious possibility in not being the government tomorrow, and therefore must want to share a cross-party value consensus in keeping competition open and fair.

As Adrian Pabst (2016) has noted, in a critique of the idea of post-democracy, there must also be institutions that stand outside the reach of democracy itself, able to check the misuse of power by elected rulers. This reflects the liberal view that political leaders, even democratically elected ones, are vulnerable to various kinds of corruption, in particular to aggrandizing their own power and using it to manipulate events and apparent facts to guarantee that they keep winning elections and stay in office. In the famous words of Lord Acton, a nineteenth-century British Liberal politician, ‘all power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely’. In short, liberal democracy refers to a form of government that combines universal adult citizenship and voting rights with institutions that entrench the protection of uncertainty, diversity and the possibility of change, even against the preferences of those who win democratic elections. It is particularly important that law courts and the judiciary remain beyond the reach of political interference, and that government remains subordinate to the law, what Germans call the Rechtstaat (literally, ‘law state’). The achievement of the rule of law predates the rise of democracy, and there is occasionally tension between the two principles. From time to time, elected politicians claim that ‘unelected judges’ should be subordinate to them. This is a major warning sign that politicians are hungry for ‘absolute power’. We shall encounter several recent examples in the following chapters.

Liberal democracy has its enemies. There are those who believe in the imposition from above of clear rules by rulers who know best. Monarchs and monarchists were once the primary exponents of that view – ‘monarch’ means ‘rule by one’. Religious organizations are often governed in this way, both internally and in what they try to impose on the rest of society. Nearly all modern business leaders are enemies of liberal democracy within their own organizations, insisting on the unchallengeable authority of the chief executive officer, and they sometimes believe that the same principles should be applied more widely; if ordinary employees (citizens) have no right to a voice, decisions can be made quickly and firmly. It is often believed that the efficiency and profit that this brings amply compensate for many people’s views being ridden over roughshod or not even heard, and for occasional major errors. Such persons will often be heard comparing favourably the Chinese state’s ability to build airports wherever and whenever it likes, while in western countries people who would be negatively affected are allowed to argue their case and at least hold up progress while their objections are considered.

Historically, opposition to liberal democracy was a position of the traditional conservative right and then of the fascistic authoritarian right, and, as we shall see in Chapter 5, this opposition is enjoying a major revival today. But for much of the twentieth century the major challenge came from the left, in the state-socialist or communist form of ‘people’s democracy’. That phrase had been adopted by the victors of the Russian Revolution, later exported to those parts of Europe in which the Russian army was in occupation after the defeat of fascism and Nazism in the Second World War. It was also used in the separate communist revolution in Yugoslavia and in many parts of the developing world as revolutionary elites threw off colonial rule by west European powers. Communism was an example of the eruption of politics relevant to the lives of working people, and the elevation of the working class as a heroic class. But its democratic moment was very brief. According to the theories of Karl Marx and of Vladimir Lenin, the interests of the working class were not those actually voiced by working people themselves, but by those who would fulfil the historical destiny of that class, as outlined in Marx’s writings. The vast majority of workers could not be expected to grasp this, so the key role in interpreting their interests was given to the communist parties that represented them. There being a grave danger that enemies of the revolution might subvert this process, power had to be kept in the hands of a reliable leadership. Debate, dissent and the presentation of alternatives were all crushed. Particularly when Josef Stalin assumed total power in the Soviet Union, as Russia and the neighbouring countries absorbed into its regime became known, this intolerance unleashed a reign of terror and violence as vicious as that of Nazism.

Europe’s communist regimes never developed the climate of open debate and ability to criticize governments without being punished that are the vital substructure of democracy. They eventually collapsed in 1990 as soon as a new reform leadership in Moscow made it clear that Russian tanks would no longer be available to crush opponents. Whereas institutions in the western world, built on liberal political and economic principles that incorporate uncertainty and constant needs to change, have been able to adapt to challenges, the rigid and hierarchical certainties of state socialism collapsed entirely once they were no longer guaranteed by armed force.

The record of state socialist regimes almost everywhere suggests that Acton’s dictum applies just as much to their leaders as to others. Since the fall of Russian and east European state socialism in 1990, few have been willing to argue for the superiority of people’s democracy. For present purposes, this leaves us with two main lessons. First, those institutions that sustain the liberal version of democracy are highly important, even though they also play a role in sustaining post-democracy. Second, the problem of the corruption of liberal democracy by wealth remains. We shall return to both these themes in later chapters.