Why is democracy under pressure in the West?

Modern-day elites have lost the ability to keep the masses onside, write Alan Philps

US president Barack Obama tours the 2016 White House Science Fair in the Blue Room at the White House. Saul Loeb / AFP

If you think about it, democracy has always been a strange concept. The majority – the poorer, less educated members of society with no experience of wielding power – get to control the elite who have the property, the wealth and the history of governing. This seems to go against nature and it is hardly surprising that in antiquity, some oligarchs saw democracy as enslavement to the mob.

Despite this contradiction, democracy in various forms has thrived from its origins in ancient Greece. In the 1990s, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama hailed liberal democracy as the “end of history”, the best system of government that humankind could devise. If that is true then why, two decades on, do we see major western democracies in crisis?

Established political parties – the means whereby the “will of the people” expressed at the ballot box is turned into workable government – are being challenged by a mood of insurgency from the United States to Europe and beyond. The US Republican Party, once the home of the conservative, pro-business elite, is being torn apart by the billionaire Donald Trump, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, who has captured the anger of the white working class. Even if he is not chosen as the presidential candidate, there are questions whether the party can ever bring back together its two main factions – internationalist and pro-business on one side and nationalistic, anti-immigrant on the other.

The insurgency can be seen all over Europe, where traditional politics is threatened by forces of the far right or far left. In Britain, the Labour party, the party of Tony Blair, has swung sharply to the left while Spain, a byword for smooth transitions between left and right since the end of the Franco dictatorship, has been unable to form a government since December when the two-party system fractured. In France the far-right National Front is on the rise, while Poland and Hungary are ruled by authoritarian parties opposed to the liberal ideals of the European Union.

There are reasons for all these difficulties. The European Union, while it appears abroad as a uniquely successful union of 28 nations, seems increasingly like a failure to its residents as it struggles to resolve the twin crises of the euro and mass migration. It is not time to write off democracy as a whole – India had a successful election in 2014. But there are some common factors which explain why the democratic system which worked in good times in western countries is now under such strain.

The first is globalisation. It has many definitions but this is one: a process that lifts hundreds of millions in the developing world – such as China – from abject poverty while constraining wages in developed countries. The effect is to kindle a new class war in developed countries between the working class, who lose, and the financial and business elite, who gain. It is now all but impossible for a top-level corporate leader in the United States to be seen as patriotic.

Allied to this is the fact that financial interest reigns supreme, to the detriment of old concepts of solidarity and fairness. The contributions of rich individuals and corporations tend to swing elections in the US. These are hardly philanthropic: donations are a form of lobbying. Hence the popularity of Mr Trump (who is spending his own money on his election campaign and thus seen as beholden to no corporate interest) and Bernie Sanders, the Democratic contender and avowed socialist, who relies on small donations from individuals. Meanwhile, the rich are taking a greater share of wealth and social mobility in America is declining. In Britain research into graduate earnings shows that the sons and daughters of the well-off have higher salaries than those from poor backgrounds, even when they studied the same course at the same college.

The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, this week urged people not to turn inward and to prioritise “hope over fear”. But as a pre-eminent member of the global elite, his words are not likely to swing many disgruntled US voters. The principal reason is that the growth engine has stalled, and most Americans cannot expect their children to do better than they did. Talk of “secular stagnation” now appears more credible than any politician’s promise to bring back the good old days. Those days were golden largely because many democratic countries got into ever deeper debt to fund the promises made at election time, a process which cannot go on forever.

Finally, the digital revolution is replacing real-world communities, where people have to get on with folk who do not share their convictions, with online “communities of belief” where everyone has the same ideas. This is particularly clear in the US. Conspiracy theories, such as the belief that Barack Obama was not a US-born citizen, which would have been banished to the wacky fringes in the days when newspapers and a few TV networks ruled, now have a life of their own. David Brooks, The New York Times columnist, writes: “People put politics at the centre of their psychological, emotional and even spiritual life.” A party political system based on compromise cannot function when political principles are as immutable as religion. The big-tent parties through which the elites mobilised the masses are increasingly a thing of the past.

Modern-day elites have lost the ability to keep the masses onside. To return to classical Athens, the fate of the modern-day oligarchs is not enslavement to the mob, because there is not one mob, but rather an ever increasing number of constituencies all with strongly held views. At the same time, globalisation has limited the freedom of the leaders of individual states to run their own economies. All are subject to the moods of the bond markets and the changing prices of commodities and currencies. The presidents and prime ministers of liberal democracies are learning the true meaning of government by the people.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs

On Twitter @aphilps