Democracy is having a bit of a crisis. The Brexit referendum has caused the biggest impasse in British politics for generations, with bids for a re-run of the vote, a power struggle between the government and Parliament and widespread arguments about what type of exit from the EU the leave mandate actually empowers the government to implement. In America, where Donald Trump was elected President with less than 50% of the popular vote, an investigations into alleged election meddling by Russia, with or without the knowledge and help of those close to Trump, has for more than two years preoccupied the Democrats and a majority of the media who see impeachment as a means of getting rid of a President they disapprove of.
Such cracks in the veneer of our celebrated democracies reveal what is certainly no surprise: that the result of the democratic process is most pleasing to the winners, and that, sometimes, the losers are plentiful and vociferous enough to make their challenge heard and put a spanner in the democratic wheel. But so far, in the history of representative democracy with universal suffrage, it has never been anywhere close enough to threaten the authority of the system. Our way of government has broad public support and has been implemented successfully in all western countries and beyond.
But of course, it is a fairly recent invention. Not long ago, it was the norm that an autocratic monarch with divine right to rule could decree the law of the land, tax the people and send men to die in wars to defend the realm, all with the same legitimacy as is enjoyed by the democratically elected governments of today. Early attempts at democracy were equally able to lay down the law, despite participation being restricted to groups such as the aristocracy (as in England under the Magna Carta) or adult males (as in 6th century BC Athens or America before the 19th Amendment). What these systems – and all other stable governments throughout– share is simply an ability to make decisions with a degree of legitimacy that allows the practical implementation of policies. Many people – indeed, through the majority of history, most people – were disenfranchised, and many may not have consented to being ruled in this way, but if they were not numerous enough, or not well enough organised to rise in rebellion, it didn’t matter. Governments are stable until they lose legitimacy with constituencies so powerful that they threaten to reform or overthrow the system.
Is, then, modern western-style liberal democracy a model of government with such wholesale popular a mandate that there is no risk of its downfall? Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist and author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992), believed so: to him, it represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and was “the final form of human government”. And it is true that the raging storms over Brexit and Trump don’t matter as long as the furore doesn’t delegitimise the entire process. The debate over the possibility of a 2nd Brexit referendum between Remainers (“there is a majority against Brexit now, we need another vote”) and Leavers (“we already voted”) is really a technical debate: each side evaluate the rules of the system to gain an argument. Or take the UK’s first-past-the-post system, which delivers such dramatically different parliamentary compositions to proportionate representation that the value of individual votes is vastly different across the two systems. Yet most people readily accept it, simply because the rules of individual democracies are respected as legitimate. It is, in fact, not even important if elections are rigged, what matters is if people know they are. As long the result is respected the system works, because it delivers what it is designed to deliver: a government that is able to rule. Or, put differently, someone’s got to make the calls, and the role of the political system is to provide a stable environment in which to make them.
The risk to the system is if people start questioning the rules. Any society with a big, centralised government needs buy-in to whatever legitimises their power, and in modern liberal democracies that buy-in comes from a near universal belief that it delivers people power (the word’s literal translation from ancient Greek). But here’s the catch: whether it does or not isn’t important – the real role of the system is to legitimise policy decisions.
And that is the threat of Brexit and Trump: they are events which may rock the boat. In his brilliant book Democracy – the God that Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that a good tyrant is better than a bad democratically elected government (and also more likely). His visceral critique of democracy is, however, not widely read and being against political democracy is very much a fringe view. But maybe those of us who believe it to amount to nothing more than mob rule and resent the tyranny of the majority can hope recent events represent the first tiny ripple that forebodes a wave of discontent which may, someday, threaten the status quo.