As an observer of democracies and a constitutional lawyer in Britain, I have watched with rising alarm as many Western nations threaten to become failed democracies.
They may not yet be like Venezuela, Peru, Hungary, Turkey or Russia. But these countries show what can happen when a democracy dies with a whimper, not with a bang. There may not be tanks on the lawns or mobs in the streets, but slowly, they are drained of everything that once made them democratic, often with substantial public support.
These countries have elections, legislatures, courts and so on. The institutional framework is still there. But they are no longer democracies because the political culture on which democracy depends has failed.
Now the United States is in danger of being added to this list. There are tensions among its institutions, though they are still largely functioning. But the deterioration of its political culture is striking — and alarming. The country resembles other Western democracies in buckling under the weight of increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state from its electorate.
Democracy is a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government and a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable. That is the institutional framework.
A democratic culture depends on something more than institutions. It depends on the instincts of politicians and citizens. It calls for a willingness to choose solutions that the greatest number of people can live with. It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow citizens with whom they disagree — and not as enemies to be smashed.
Hence the significance of President Trump, who exhibits the three classic symptoms of totalitarianism: a charismatic leader surrounded by a personal cult, the identification of the state with himself and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of opposition or dissent. The result is a regime of discretionary government in place of the government of laws that the founders saw as the chief defense against tyranny.
Mr. Trump has used public powers to pursue private grudges: for example, against law firms that represented his political opponents; public figures for whom he has removed security protection; or cultural institutions, from Harvard to the Kennedy Center, that do not share his personal agenda.
Article 2 of the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Yet this, too, has become dependent on the president’s personal discretion. Mr. Trump has directed the Justice Department not to enforce laws passed by Congress such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has reduced or wound up programs for which Congress has appropriated funds and has threatened governors and other authorities with cutting off federal funds unless they submit to his wishes.
Foreign observers like myself have the luxury of watching these developments from a distance, but we need to look at the vulnerability of our own democracies. What is happening in the United States is essentially a crisis of expectations that is common to other advanced democracies as well. A respected polling organization in Britain in 2019 found that a majority of people (54 percent) agreed with the statement that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules.”
Continental Europe has seen high levels of electoral support for openly authoritarian figures, such as Marine Le Pen in France, Jörg Haider in Austria, Viktor Orban in Hungary and the leading lights of Alternative for Germany.
The reasons are complex, but the main one is the increasingly unrealistic expectations of the state and the electorates’ growing aversion to risk. Some of what voters expect is beyond the capacity of the state to deliver. Some of it can be delivered only at the expense of other equally important values. This is especially true of voters’ most powerful expectation, that the state will protect them against adverse economic winds.
We crave state protection from many risks that are inherent in life: job insecurity, economic misfortune, drought, fire and flood, sickness and accidental injury. This is in some ways a natural response to the remarkable increase in the technical competence of humanity since the middle of the 19th century. For all perils, we demand a governmental solution. If there is none, we put that down to governmental incompetence.
When these expectations are disappointed, as they so often are, people blame the system or the “deep state.” They turn against the whole political class, which has proved unable to satisfy their demands for a progressive improvement of their lives. In the absence of a democratic culture, they spontaneously turn to strongmen and kid themselves that strongmen get things done.
The United States is a particularly interesting example. It has enjoyed a century and a half of almost unbroken good fortune. This may now be coming to an end in the face of competition from countries like India and China. Old skills have become redundant in high-wage economies as national prosperity has shifted to high-tech industries, hitting incomes traditionally derived from manufacturing, agriculture and the extraction industry. Even in the high-tech sectors where the United States is strongest, its lead has shortened and in some cases vanished.
These are not exclusively American problems. Europe suffers from them even more, and European expectations of the state are higher. The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any democracy. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the crisis of Europe that began in 1914 and ended in 1945.
The tragedy is that historical experience warns us that strongmen do not get things done. At best they may indulge the fantasies of some of the population. But at what cost? Strongmen tend to be fixated on a few simple ideas that they offer as solutions to complex problems. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enable them to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, a strongman promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. All of this usually makes for chaos, political breakdown, economic impoverishment and social divisions.
If enough Americans persistently vote authoritarian figures into government and their cheerleaders into Congress, then democracy will not survive. But that is not yet an inevitability.
The founding fathers of the United States were profoundly conscious of the cultural underpinnings of democracy and well aware of its fragility. The second U.S. president, John Adams, summed up their fears in a letter written in old age. Democracy, he wrote, was just as vulnerable to vanity, pride, avarice and ambition as any other form of government, and a good deal less stable. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote.
The founders’ answer to the self-destructive tendencies of democracy was to design “a government of laws and not of men.” A government of laws was based on rational principles, consistently applied. A government of men was something different: an invitation to rule by discretion, subject to the whims of a handful of men at the heart of the state, guided by the very vices of vanity, pride, avarice and ambition which Adams knew would sooner or later destroy any democracy.
There have been demagogues before in American history. Until now, they have failed. Political parties had enough respect for the workings of the democratic state to freeze them out.
The many friends of the United States must hope that the experience of autocratic government will persuade voters to restore the country’s democratic tradition and truly make America great again.
Jonathan Sumption is a former justice of the Supreme Court of Britain and the author of “The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
