How Democracy Dies
We cannot take democracy for granted; those of us living in democracies are enjoying a rare moment of freedom in human history.
We take democracy for granted. Very few of us living in democracies are old enough to have fought for it. We are the inheritors of our grandparents’ victories and we often don’t realise how hard they worked to build the democracies we enjoy. We were born into them, and as with any inheritance that we didn’t work for, we risk taking it for granted and frittering it away.
I’ve written before that the simplest measure of success for a form of government is life expectancy. At the very basic level, we ask of those who rule us that their rule affords us health and longevity. This has, in many ways, been the basic measure of social systems since early humans first formed societies; those that worked out how to live longer thrived, those that didn’t declined and vanished.
Democracies are good for health and longevity. By contrast, dictatorships and autocracies tend to have lower life expectancies, worse health, and less prosperity. In Russia, life expectancy is 71, in Germany it is 81.
There is a simple reason for this. In a democracy, where people can vote out their leaders, a form of political natural selection takes place. Those leaders who fail are removed from the political system, and those who succeed are given greater power. In fully enfranchised societies, politicians have to address the needs of those most vulnerable in order to get elected, and this leads to better public health outcomes.
However badly democracies fail, and however rotten their politicians get, the political natural selection of a free vote means they eventually right themselves, replacing the bad politicians with better ones who turn things around again. America survived Trump. The UK will eventually eject Johnson and his corrupt and incompetent government.
Well-functioning democracies allow people the luxury of forgetting they are in a democracy. Things work, so they don’t require our attention. Democracy works so well, overall, that it is very easy to assume it has emerged as the only logical way forward for humankind. All the other systems have basically failed. They either end, like the great empires, or they come and go in flashes of horror, like the Third Reich. In political systems that do not afford people health, justice, and freedom, those people are miserable, and eventually they rise up and overthrow their monarch, dictator, colonist, invader or whomever is supressing them. Freedom and justice, health and wellbeing, are basic human desires, across all time and cultures.
Dictatorships fail because decision-making is not meritocratic or open to the process whereby a society can remove those making bad decisions. Russia is a prime example of this. One man is making the decisions based on a delusional and misinformed view of the world and influenced by the interests of only a tiny minority of society. Those decisions will exacerbate the misery and decline for most people, and eventually that will lead to the end of his rule. In badly run countries, like Russia, people die in larger numbers, procreate less, and leave when they can. This is why dictatorships never thrive or flourish. These are patterns throughout history that repeat every time. It may not be now, but eventually it will be this way.
The mechanics of why dictatorships fail can be seen in Russia’s military failures in Ukraine. Russia’s army is a reflection of the society from which it is formed. Putin created a country riven with corruption, with no rule of law, in which there is no truth. His army has turned out to be corrupt, without discipline, and full of lies. Battles go badly because money intended for equipment was siphoned off through corruption as it passed down the chain. Nobody tells the truth, so the reality of the battlefield doesn’t pass up the chain of command. Soldiers are drunk, looting, and murderous, firing up the Ukrainians to fight harder, giving them a cause behind their fight that the Russians and mercenaries lack. Everyone lies to everyone, so the chain of command continues to pass back down orders that do not take account of the rot on the ground, and so the failure continues. Historically, armies like these lose wars, or mutiny, just as societies like this rebel or collapse.
Despite a confidence and determination across the West that Russia will, eventually, lose this war, those of us still lucky to live in democracies should take it as a reminder that our democracies cannot be taken for granted. Hungary and Poland have gone from dictatorship to democracy, and back again to authoritarianism. They are not the first democratic societies to vote away their freedoms to populist regimes that that then become authoritarian, and from there evolve into autocracies or dictatorships. Democracy’s greatest strength is also its biggest weakness: that everyone gets a vote. This means that skilful populists, like Viktor Orban, can persuade people to vote away that right to vote, and from there become entrenched enough eventually to avoid votes counting again.
This war in Ukraine has also shown us that democracy is not only not permanent, it is far from ubiquitous. The Economist calculated that “32% of the world’s population lives in a country where the government has supported Russia’s actions,” and that two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries that either support Russia, or are neutral. The countries opposing Russia make up only 36% of the world’s population, though they also represent about 70% of global GDP.
Despite the fact that democracies are rich, powerful, and give people more freedom and longer lives, only 29% of the world’s population currently live in liberal democracies, down from nearly 53% in 2000. Meanwhile, the number of people living in autocratic regimes has risen from 46% to 70% since 2000. Democracy is being attacked on all sides. China and India, rapidly growing economically and in terms of population, are not democracies and do not condemn Russia.
By population, the world is already predominantly not democratic. Democracies are declining, both because their populations are aging, and because people in democracies such as Hungary and Poland are voting away their democratic rights. America came close to doing the same thing, and may yet vote in an autocrat with anti-democratic tendencies. This would leave the people living in functioning, liberal democracies a frightening minority in the world.
Those of us living in democracies, who want our children and grandchildren to enjoy the same freedoms we have — to live long, live well, and be free — we are a blip in history, our era is a mere spark of light in a long history of darkness. If we do not cherish, nurture, and defend our way of life, it will end up just as a chapter in a history book.
Right now, that fight is in Ukraine. It is likely to be a long fight, and one which impacts on every one of us. We will end up paying for this battle, at least in higher energy bills, taxation, and inflation, if not more. It is up to those of us in democracies not to vote out our pro-democracy governments as punishment for the cost to us they may incur by protecting our way of life and opposing Putin. We must not be complacent about our way of life, and like our grandparents we need to be willing to suffer considerable hardships to preserve it. With Ukraine, this may not mean war in our cities, but it may require significant economic pain, migration, and political resolve. Our generation’s version of fighting on the beaches may be that we have to support our liberal politicians while they take very difficult decisions, and not punish them when our food and energy prices soar, or our countries are flooded with refugees.
Democracy as we have enjoyed it could easily end, returning us to a life experienced by most people today, and by most people historically, in which we are not free, are poorer, and live shorter and sadder lives. It falls to all of us to stop that.