Why Do The Cultural Elites Hate Election ?
Because they want to impose a Lockdown on Democracy
Democracy is the only resource that people can draw on if they want voice their views, influence their circumstance and in some instances to take control of their life. Which is why throughout history democracy has been threatened by the oligarchical holders of power. Today, animosity towards elections has been growing amongst the political and cultural elites of the Western world. They still have not got over the trauma they experienced when the British people voted for Brexit and when Donald Trump got elected as President of the United States. The reason for their current concern with democracy is that populist parties are gaining support amongst the electorate.
Animosity towards elections and the results they tend to produce is highlighted in two commentaries published last month in both The New York Times and The Atlantic. The commentary in The New York Times was originally published under the title of ‘Elections Are Bad for Democracy’. It was quietly changed to ‘The Worst People Run for Office. It's Time for a Better Way’. Presumably the change in title was motivated by the goal of deflecting attention to the author’s hostility to elections.
Usually, arguments against democracy are based on the idea that the people are too simple, and stupid to know what they are voting for. They also claim that voters are too easily manipulated by demagogues and are therefore likely to make wrong choices. The commentators in the New York Times and the Atlantic avoid the explicit condemnation of the people. Instead they rely on arguments that avoids attacking democracy and instead focus on criticising elections. Adam Grant of The New York Times contends that usually the people that run in elections are unreliable, narcissistic and lacking in integrity. From this perspective it is inevitable that the wrong people will get elected and therefore it is better to choose leaders through a system of lottery.
Grant presents the system of random selection leaders as democratic because everyone has an equal chance of winning the lottery. Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic argues that there are too many elections in the United States and that ‘Americans vote too much’. He suggests that voters are unreasonably expected to spend far too much time voting and playing the role of amateur politicians. The implication of his arguments is to cut down on voting and leave politics to professional politics and experts.
Grant’s critique of elections and his call to turn public life into a lottery would have the effect of de-politicising society. It would spell the end of debate, and argument. A lottery resulting in choosing nameless and untested individuals would in effect leave all power in the hands of technocrats and experts. The only purpose of this lottery is to create the illusion that everyone has a chance to influence public affairs. In reality a lottery would undermine the capacity of the people to elect candidates who reflect their views. Cutting down on elections would have a similar consequence. Elected officials would be replaced by appointed technocrats and experts.
As it happens democracy cannot exist without the institutionalisation of elections. To be sure elections can be messy and often the wrong person get chosen but nevertheless it is only through elections that people can make their voice really heard. In today’s world elections serve as the main conduit of public life. They also provide a powerful instrument for checking the power of the political and cultural establishment. Opponents of elections are not the friends of democracy but their bitter enemies.
Below is an excerpt from my study Democracy Under Siege: Don’t Let Them Lock It Down. It provides a historical context for understanding the current attacks on the principle of democratic election.
An Anti-Democratic Moment
Since its emergence in Ancient Athens over 2,500 years ago, democracy has consistently been threatened by powerful enemies of freedom and equality. Noticeably during the past century – during the 1930s and 1940s - the campaign against democracy assumed the character of a full-blown military conflict. But in the recent era, opponents of democracy have sought to belittle it using a different tactic: by depriving it of its moral authority. For the most part, they do this by calling into question the capacity of people to play the role of an intelligent and responsible citizen. Critics frequently contend that everyday citizens not only lack the knowledge but are also far too irrational to be able to make sound choices.
And so, unlike in the past - in the 1930s, say – today’s propaganda war against democracy assumes a silent form. Indeed, its silence is almost intrinsic to it – principally because since the end of World War II, it is widely recognised that no regime can possibly claim to be legitimate unless it can assert that its authority rests on public consent and democratic institutions. Even sceptics and foes of real democracy, such as the dictatorial Government of North Korea, feel obliged to call itself the Democratic Republic of North Korea.
Yet in practice, even in western liberal democracies, it often seems that there is little genuine love for democracy. This sentiment is most strikingly communicated in the mainstream’s hostility to movements it describes as populist. The term populist is often used as term of abuse. Yet it refers to people who simply aspire to gain a voice in public life. In recent years, the electoral success of populist movements and causes has led elite policy makers and commentators to voice anxiety about the fragility of democratic decision-making. In many cases - at least among the anti-populist commentators and elites – the previous begrudged acceptance of democracy has given way to Democracy Panic.
Don’t just take my word for it. Go to any large bookshop and you will find one recently published book after another attacking and criticising democracy. Since the publication of Jason Brennan’s invective against the people – Against Democracy (2006) - there has been a veritable renaissance in the publication of elitist, anti-democratic tomes.
In recent years, scepticism towards the value of democracy has mutated into outright condemnation in response to the failure of anti-populist interests to make headway in recent election. For the philosopher A.C. Grayling, the author of Democracy and its Crisis (2017), the results of the referendum over Brexit and the of the 2016 American Presidential Election serves as proof that ‘something has gone seriously wrong in the state of democracy’.
Grayling is far from alone in condemning democracy for allowing populist movements to make significant headway. Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt’s book How Democracies Die (2018) points to ‘democratic backsliding’, which apparently ‘begins at the ballot box’. In this and other studies, democracies’ defects are attributed to the unpredictable and irrational behaviour of the people. The coupling of democracy with the metaphor of death is also highlighted in a feature of Foreign Affairs, which has as its title; ‘Is Democracy Dying’? Books with titles such as Saving Democracy From Suicide, Democracy In Chains, and How Democracy Ends, communicate a dystopian sense of foreboding about democracy, based on what they regard as its inability to deliver the right results
On a more fundamental level, this current wave of anti-populist and anti-democratic literature is underpinned by a profound sense of anxiety about the loss of elite authority. Yet its authors consistently fail to acknowledge that this authority has been unravelling ever since the Cold War. The literature promoting Democracy Panic, rarely asks itself why representatives of the political establishment struggle to challenge and neutralise the appeal of its populist opponents. Rather than explore the implications of the loss of its authority, they find it much easier to point the finger of blame elsewhere; namely, in the moral deficiencies of voters. The belief that drives Democracy Panic is the conviction that the people cannot be trusted. They are derided and blamed for failing to act in accordance with the wisdom of their political and cultural superiors. As one commentator asserted in The Atlantic; ‘our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around’.
Invariably the pejorative framing of those who abandoned their political superiors leads to the questioning of the value of popular sovereignty and consent. Finding a way of limiting the need for consent has become a key ambition of the political establishment. As we note in chapter 9, taking policy decision-making out of the realm of politics and shifting them to the domain of technocracy is the favoured tactic used to by-pass the consent of the electorate.
Democracy is really under threat. Not like it was in the 1930s, however, when it was subjected to the whims of explicitly authoritarian and totalitarian forces. Instead, it is now victim to a far less crystallised, far more cynical culture of animosity towards the belief that ordinary citizens can be trusted to rule themselves and their society. Indeed, through its representation in the media and within institutions of culture and education, democracy has become entirely associated with negative characteristics – so much so that we are now experiencing a heightened version what the social commentator, Christopher Lasch, once characterised as a ‘democratic malaise’.
Begrudged at best
Since its emergence in Ancient Greece democracy has always been the target of powerful forces who regard the exercise of people’s power with dread. But while democracy has been reviled by certain powers for centuries, it could not be erased as those very same leaders were fully aware that they could not govern without, at the very least, the passive consent of the ‘many’. Of course, the necessity for consent was from the first only begrudgingly accepted. Indeed, the ruling classes have repeatedly sought ways of limiting the meaning of popular consent, as well as the opportunities for participating in the running of society.
There were two main reasons why despite all the odds, the aspiration for democracy and popular representation has survived and continues to serve as a source of inspiration. Historically, emperors and monarchs justified their authority by claiming that they personified and represented God’s will. But with the passing of time, thanks in part to the move towards secularisation following the Protestant Reformation, justification based on religion lost its power to legitimate the authority of divine kingship. And as I have pointed out elsewhere, since the 18th century, rulers have insisted that their status was based on their capacity to represent and express popular opinion[v].
Crucially, the resulting debate about the meaning of popular opinion provided an occasion to widen opportunities for individuals and groups to voice their views. Kings and nobles could no longer claim to possess a monopoly on political representation. It was in this context that ideas about the right of the people to enjoy greater political influence gained force. And once the genie of popular representation was let out of the bottle, it was only a matter of time before the spirit of democracy followed suit.
As we shall explore in the chapters to follow, throughout most of history, democracy was a negative euphemism for the tyranny of the majority. Indeed, even after the establishment of representative democracies in the 19th century, the capacity of citizens to contribute to the process of decision-making was regarded with scepticism. Throughout the 20th century, the political life of the West was punctuated with anxiety about the unpredictable consequence of the working of democracy. In fact, that democracy has acquired positive connotations is mainly due to the tragic events surrounding Second World War, and the visceral reaction of humanity to the war’s totalitarian violence.
And yet in post-1945 Europe, supporters of representative government were explicitly hostile to the rule of the majority – majoritarian democracy – and relied on technocratic institutions to limit the influence of the electorate. In practice, a rhetorical affirmation of democracy coexisted with a commitment to contain its influence.
This paradox was implicitly recognised even by the American political commentator Francis Fukuyama in his famous celebratory essay on the demise of the Cold War. Pointing to the erosion of explicitly authoritarian alternatives, he remarked that there is no ideology ‘with pretensions to universality that is in the position to challenge liberal democracy’, adding that there was ‘no universal principle of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people’. Fukuyama acknowledged that democracy constitutes the only foundation for authority and concluded that ‘even non-democrats will have to speak the language of democracy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard’.
Fortunately, it is relatively straightforward to spot an anti-democrat in disguise. More often than not, their only justification for putting up with democracy rests upon their cynical observation that all the other alternative narratives have been discredited. And yet for all their half-baked attempts to conceal their genuine anti-democratic convictions, their scorn always lurks in the background, often taking the form of a condescending suspicion towards populism. They use the term populism as a code for communicating the fear that it is a disease of democracy. As one study points out, ‘many authors maintain that populism is first and foremost a democratic disease or pathology’[vii]
Democracy needs to be upheld as a value in its own right otherwise it will serve instrumental needs and lack inspirational content. Unfortunately, the idea that democracy is valuable in its own right is challenged by the prevailing consensus that regard it merely as a useful instrument for arriving at decisions. It suggests that ‘equal right to vote has no intrinsic value’.[viii]. In western societies, supporters of liberal democracy argue that liberalism trumps the value of democracy. Fareed Zakaria, a leading critic of populist democracy explicitly endorses the idea that liberalism is logically superior to democracy. He contends that democracy is about procedures to select a government, whereas liberalism is about the promotion of goals such as the protection of individual autonomy, individual liberty and constitutionalism[ix]. According to this schema liberalism is endowed with a normative content, whereas democracy possesses only procedural qualities.
As we shall see, I take a view that is the direct opposite of Zakaria. To understand why, we must first appreciate that how we view democracy depends on how we regard human beings and their potential for development, for exercising self-rule and for taking responsibility for their community and fellow human beings. For anti-democrats, most humans lack the moral and intellectual resources necessary to trust them with determining the future direction of their society. But from where I see it, to put it simply, it is only through living democratically that people develop their potential to become authors of their own lives and create a society based on genuine solidarity. But more on that later…
Festering in the own self-regard of its proponents, antidemocratic sentiments have acquired the character of a veritable ideology; one that presents itself as a holier-than-thou response to the alleged threat of fascism, xenophobia and the politics of hate. And yet, for all their social media posts about ‘solidarity’ and ‘empowerment’, the anti-populist outlook promoted by the western cultural and political establishment is driven by a profound sense of mistrust and hostility towards democracy and the demos.
Democracy is the only medium through realising a better world. Elections serve as an instrument for putting democracy into action. That is why we must resist the project of undermining the authority of the electoral process
The arguments in this post are elaborated in my book Democracy Under SiegeL Don’t Let Them Lock It Down
