By John Foster
A fascist telling his followers they won’t vote again after his election makes sense.
“You won’t have to do it any more,” Donald Trump told a rapt audience at an Evangelical conference in July.
“Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine.”
It wasn’t the first time Trump dropped this bomb. But it was the most direct.
This was a wake-up call, particularly for those Americans disappointed by President Biden’s performance who were willing to exchange January 6 for better leadership.
A more proactive, conscious candidate might be one thing. But this was a bridge too far.
The era of democracy has been ending for a while now. To be fair, it was always less than its backers made out.
Even at its height, boosters of liberal democracy were all too willing to tolerate regimes that made brutal mockery of the ideals that they claimed to espouse.
Still, the one thing liberal democracy had going for was that it was better than the alternatives.
While the USSR started as an alternative, by the 1950s, even its most one-eyed supporters would laugh at claims it was a worker’s utopia.
The version of Soviet society that emerged after Stalin’s death in 1953 was less shamelessly homicidal but hardly less cynical.
The same held true for the down-market alternatives in Eastern Europe.
One reason communism died out in West Germany (even before it was officially banned in 1956) was that those inclined to live in the DDR could easily do so.
In Berlin, it was as easy as crossing the street. Needless to say, there weren’t many takers.
In The Protest Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), German sociologist Max Weber wrote that modern capitalism had “attained a level of civilisation never before achieved”.
From the 1950s on, postwar democracies recast this liberal triumphalism in an endless stream of self-congratulation.
If this civilisation did not extend to every corner of the globe, leaving out non-whites who didn’t fit the model of “the people”, history would eventually catch up with them.
It was incumbent on those for whom the arc had not yet bent sufficiently far to resist the temptation to be so ungrateful as to mention their exclusion.
Those who remained on the margins, suffering several decades of austerity policies, or never benefited from the end of communism (or both) would eventually swing right.
A defining feature of the current state of the world is a return of the repressed in global politics.
Much as the impulses that gave rise to fascism never entirely went away after its defeat in 1945, most conservatives downplayed its virtues until after the Cold War.
In the liberal capitalist metropole of Europe and North America, a metapolitical consensus reigned.
Politics was a competition between the moderate social democratic left and the moderate Christian democratic right, with both sides conceding the outcomes generated.
Democracy was held up as a model, but only for those states and people mature enough to exercise it responsibly.
When this responsibility was lacking, as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973, other measures were required to restore moderation and respect for property rights.
The democratic consensus, or at least the lip service paid to it, has continued to the present day. Liberal democracy’s boosters never tire of decrying the kleptocracies in Russia and other post-Soviet states.
The misdeeds of Xi and his associates in the Chinese Communist Party are similarly deplored.
This is not exactly wrong. Putin, Orbán and their various nationalist acolytes are thugs and cynics, and there is nothing wrong with saying so, particularly on the left.
Given the persistence of populist leadership, the question remains as to how much of, or how much longer, the democracy of the United States and European Union will remain.
American democracy has always been less than the sum of its parts. In its origins, it had all of the limitations common to all early essays in the craft: property qualifications and exclusions based on race and gender.
The last of these persisted in practice (particularly in the southeast) long after they had been formally eliminated.
But even when de jure suffrage was extended to all adults, election to the presidency was still (and continues to be) bottlenecked by the Electoral College, an institution conceived of by the founders to forestall the excesses of the unruly masses.
It may seem like a bit of institutional arcana, but its modern effects are palpable.
A Republican candidate hasn’t won the popular vote for the US presidency only once since 1992. This is part of a larger and troublesome narrative for American conservatism.
Since 1948, when the GOP lost its fifth presidential election, the American right has been looking for ways to overcome the conviction, correctly held by large swaths of the middle and lower classes, that Republican policies contradicted their economic interests.
Their strategy for doing so centred on race-baiting and the cultivation of white nationalist consciousness.
Since the 1990s, it has been clear that this is a strategy with an impending shelf date. The United States is an increasingly diverse polity. In addition, younger voters tend to care less about maintaining the dubious edifice of the white Christian patriarchy.
The further metastasis of the Republican strategy in the last twenty-five years has involved a long march through the institutions. Alongside this has been the aggressive pursuit of gerrymandering to lock down congressional power.
The New York Times recently estimated that less than 50 of the 468 seats in the United States House of Representatives were subject to electoral contests that were actually competitive.
In many respects, the situation in Europe is hardly better. Looking back from the present day, the EU was originally a step forward for democratisation.
While the individual European states retain their own domestic electoral control, government at the level of the Union is subject to notable democratic deficits.
The European Parliament cannot initiate legislation. It is limited to approving or rejecting measures proposed by the European Commission.
The Commission comprises appointees of the heads of the 27 member governments. So, there is some electoral control.
However, limiting the initiation of legislation to the executive branch of the government (and to unelected appointees) is a significant brake on democratic control.
Perhaps more importantly, control over Union-wide monetary policy rests not with the member states but with the European Central Bank (ECB).
This amounts to a limitation of democratic control from the neoliberal playbook.
While the ECB was eventually convinced to take action to meet the challenges posed by the 2008 financial crisis, its dominant policy mandate has been controlling inflation to the exclusion of all other policy imperatives.
At a broader level, the EU needs to do more in practical terms to create a common identity beyond the nation-state level.
The result is a set of generally unresponsive political institutions in which the neoliberal goal of firewalling has forestalled the emergence of any measures that might address the inequalities of wealth or the problems of indebtedness at the perimeter.
Yet, the EU’s democratic deficits and the situation of democracy in the United States have not sunk to the level of electoral autocracy in the manner of Orbán’s Hungary, to say nothing of Putin’s naked kleptocracy.
Still, both the United States and the EU are moving toward daring less democracy and shifting the power of initiating political change further up the pyramid of political power.
The US and the European Union are experiencing a decline in democratic standards, coupled with the rise of right-wing populist movements.
In the EU, this is reflected in the rise of challenges by outsider organisations like Alternative für Deutschland, Rassemblement National, and Fratelli d’Italia.
In the US, the challenge is more profound, with one of the former cartel parties having been effectively colonised and hollowed out by insurgents from the far right.
It remains to be seen what the parties of the left can do to respond to these challenges.
What is clear is that attempts to repackage the political centre have resulted in parties such as the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland (SPD) and Sweden’s Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti (SAP) getting steamrolled by far-right parties that, at the very least, admit what they are.
Perhaps there is a lesson in this for the left. If not, we may be viewing the twilight of that brief springtime of democracy that seemed likely to endure forever.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.