The meaning of "saving democracy"

… and why it’s not about the will of the people

Clearly, 2024 is the year when the citizens of the West must save democracy. It doesn't matter which mainstream media outlet you open these days, and it doesn't matter which Western country you're in. Chances are high that someone will try to convince you that this is the moment to "save our democracy", and that therefore anything is justified to prevent democracy from somehow being destroyed.

People in France, Germany and the USA are being asked to vote for the 'democratic parties'. Democratic party now stands for any-party-that-is-not considered-far-right. Democracy can only be saved if these so-called far-right parties are prevented from gaining power. This justifies extraordinary measures, however undemocratic they may seem to some. Electoral and parliamentary rules that have been in place for many years and have proved their worth are now being changed or reinterpreted in ways that contradict their original spirit, all for the purpose of keeping the new parties out of power. This goal unites all other parties that were political opponents in other circumstances. 

Last July, in order to prevent Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) from winning a majority of seats in the French parliament, the other parties worked together before the second round of the elections, strategically choosing in each constituency which candidate would stand alone against the RN candidate and pooling all the non-RN votes that would normally have been distributed among several parties, allowing the RN to most likely win a majority in the French parliament. The strategy worked.

In Germany, the 'democratic' parties are now regularly working together to prevent the populist AfD from being granted certain parliamentary rights that have never been denied to any elected party since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. This includes denying the party any committee chairmanship in the Bundestag and changing the parliamentary procedure in the state of Thuringia to deny the AfD, which came first in the last elections, the usual preferential right to propose a candidate for the presidency of the parliament. A proposal is now on the table to amend the German constitution to ensure that the AfD, should it ever come to power, cannot make structural changes to the German Constitutional Court with a simple majority.

In the United States, the upcoming presidential election is clearly being framed by the Democrats as a defining moment that could mark the “end of democracy” if Trump is elected. Over the past two years, Donald Trump has been indicted in several criminal cases, and earlier this year, for the first time, a sitting or former US president was convicted of a crime. Independent observers have no doubt that "the partisan motives of the Democratic prosecutors and judges” were obvious. It was an attempt to weaken Trump's presidential campaign through lawfare, although in this case the strategy appears to have been unsuccessful.

All these measures are extraordinary and arguably set dangerous precedents. But according to the rhetoric, seemingly extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary remedies.

But what is really so dangerous about our current situation, and what do our political leaders really mean when they say that democracy is in danger and we must save it?

Democracy is often said to mean 'rule by the people'. Our representative democracies are a form of government in which the people elect representatives to make decisions 'on behalf of the people'. This is what the physicist and cultural commentator Eric Weinstein calls Type A democracy. The essence of this definition of democracy is that it is ultimately about the will of the people, as opposed to the rule of a few (oligarchy) or the rule of one (monarchy).

Contrary to what many people who hear the slogans about saving democracy every day probably fear, I don't think our political elites really believe that it is likely that Donald Trump or the European populist right-wing parties will abolish Type A democracy. Meloni in Italy and Orbán in Hungary don't seem to be trying, and Trump didn't try during his first term. Of course, one could speculate and argue that if Trump won't accept the results of the 2020 election and still says he won, he's capable of anything. Some people apparently really believe that he is a new Hitler, and after the AfD came first in the recent elections in the German state of Thuringia, a senior journalist on German public broadcaster ZDF compared the moment to the beginning of the Second World War, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939.

While this journalist, and I'm sure many others, genuinely believe that we are on the brink of a new Nazi era, it doesn't seem that this is what the strategists in our political elites who are driving the global campaign to save democracy really fear. They are motivated by something else entirely, and the will of the people is the last thing they are interested in protecting.

When asked on a talk show why the German AfD and other European populist parties could be dangerous for democracy, the renowned German historian Michael Wolffsohn cited their dangerous proximity to Putin's Russia and their sceptical, even negative attitude towards NATO membership as his two main reasons.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Type A democracy. Rather, Wolffsohn seems to define democracy as something quite different, which could be described as a set of institutions and political dogmas of the West that cannot be questioned. He is referring to what Eric Weinstein calls Type B democracy, “a set of institutions that once grew out of democracy and that must be kept strong” as part of our rules-based international order, which includes NATO, the EU, NAFTA and so on. Type B democracy also implies a sometimes explicit and often implicit agreement between the United States and its European allies that the United States will use its military power to protect Europe and its global trade routes, and in return European nations will never undermine important political and commercial interests of the United States.

This international order has been hugely beneficial to Western elites and the wider Western educated professional managerial class. But in recent decades the Western working classes have been adversely affected by this international order of free trade and globalisation. Many manufacturing jobs have moved to lower-wage countries, and recent mass immigration has put downward pressure on wages across the West. The falling life expectancy of the American working class and the widespread poverty in the old industrial towns of northern England show how badly these people have been hit by what was supposed to be a win-win economic order.

The rise of populist nationalism across the West in recent years is a rebellion against Type B democracy. What unites the national populist movement is not fascism or Nazism, but a rejection of the primacy of universalism as the underlying principle of the Western order.

As Mary Harrington argues, the internationalist consensus that has prevailed since America's victory in the Second World War, and which lies at the heart of Type B democracy, rejects the idea that there should be a national in-group to be treated preferentially. The West's free trade treaties, open border policies and asylum treaties, as well as its adherence to human rights conventions and celebration of multiculturalism, can be seen as a direct consequence of this.

According to Harrington, this is the underlying question of our current conflict:

Is it morally legitimate, under any circumstances, to distinguish between an in-group and an out-group in allocating social resources? Do out-groups exist at all? This is a fundamental ideological question; and since America won the Second World War, and egalitarianism by fiat consequently triumphed in the Land of the Free in the Sixties, the only permissible answer to this has been “no”.

Our political and economic elites have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of free trade and cheap labour through immigration. Type B democracy has brought them enormous power and wealth, which they are understandably reluctant to give up. They may even have legitimate reasons to defend the rules-based international order that go beyond self-interest. Fundamentally changing an existing order always risks creating chaos, and chaos is not preferable to the status quo.

But instead of allowing honest debate and discussion about what is at stake in the West, our elites demonise those who challenge the status quo as far-right, fascist and undemocratic. They make this about being morally good or bad, and thereby stifle any real conversation.

Ironically, the hysterical measures they take to preserve Type B democracy often clearly violate all the important principles of Type A democracy, which is what most people understand the term democracy to mean.

They are de facto abolishing the essence of democracy through totalitarian control and propaganda.

Anyone who has paid any critical attention to how the American mainstream media has systematically denied for the last four years that Joe Biden has been increasingly suffering from what is now severe dementia throughout his presidency, and only briefly brought the issue to the fore after the June debate when they feared Biden might lose to Trump, knows how almost the entire journalistic profession has become part of a huge propaganda apparatus and ceased to be journalists. Since Kamala Harris became the presidential candidate, the fact that Biden is obviously completely unfit to be president until January next year has become taboo once more in the media. All these months, no one knows who is really in charge of the country and who is making decisions about the war in Ukraine, the Middle East and so on. No journalist dares to talk about it. All this is obviously insane and should become a textbook example of how propaganda works in our time.

Normally, you would think that an ambitious young journalist from the New York Times or the Washington Post would be trying to find out how decisions are made in the White House, or what exactly the president's health is, and how much of a risk he poses to the nation's security. But no, none of these questions are asked by the traditional media. The incentive structure of the managerial class and its institutions is such that no one dares to question the many red lines. They know it would damage their careers. What's more, for most members of the managerial class disagreement with the dogmas is not even an issue, because most people in these circles think very much alike. For example, they don't question the idea that keeping Trump out of the White House is a higher priority than doing actual journalism.

But the crux of the problem is that our political elites and managerial class don't really believe in Type A democracy. They don't trust the people they govern. They feel morally superior, so they can justify to themselves that they don't have to take into account the interests and views of ordinary people. Democracy becomes an empty vessel when public opinion is entirely controlled by propaganda.

But the elites are increasingly losing control of the media due to the growing relevance of alternative journalists and new media formats. 

While the elite's censorship of dissent on the internet is accelerating, national populism and the threat it poses to Type B democracy is only possible because of these alternative media. We will see how this battle continues in the coming months and years.