Democracy is in trouble – and the people are not to blame

By: Steven Friedman

SOUTH AFRICA’s complaining classes – just about everyone in the national debate – may be surprised to learn that, by world standards, this country’s democracy is not in bad shape.

This does not mean that democracy here is flawless – it has many faults, chief among them the fact that only a third of the country is heard when issues are discussed and decisions taken. The minority who have a say have little time for the essence of democracy, the right of everyone to an equal share in all decisions which affect them. To live in poverty, or to have made the mistake of having been born in another country, is to be ignored – or worse. For some, like the activists of the shack dweller organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo, it can mean that local power holders kill you because neither the law nor the one third of the population who have a say protect you.

Democracy’s Retreat

But, despite these serious blemishes, compared to much of the rest of the world, South Africa’s democracy looks fairly healthy. People in power here are not trying to prevent many people from voting, as those in the USA or Britain are. Unlike Brazil or the Philippines, this country’s government is not run by admirers of military dictatorship. The government is not trying to deprive minorities of basic citizenship rights, as India’s is. There is no danger of the coups which have installed undemocratic governments in Mali, Sudan, Tunisia and other states.

There are many other examples. Around the world, democracy is openly rejected by leaders or is under pressure from supposedly democratic governments who want to deny their citizens basic rights.  Independent courts and judges are under pressure. People who challenge authority, whether in the media or as activists, are threatened. In many democracies, public disenchantment is reflected in low opinion polls and a widespread sense that democratic politics is not working for many people.

This does not mean that countries in which everyone can vote, in which, (in contrast to the USA), the candidate with the most votes wins, and in which people enjoy, at least in theory, rights which enable them to take part in decisions, is about to disappear. But it is a sharp contrast to a couple of decades ago when, after the collapse of the Soviet system, we were told that democracy would sweep the world in an unstoppable wave. We are being reminded that we can never take even limited freedoms for granted because they are always fragile and may always be blotted out unless we defend them.

But why is democracy under attack now? Who is to blame? One response is to claim that democracy does not work but dictatorships do. But the most common explanation among academics and pundits is to blame the people. Citizens, we are told, don’t understand that freedom is good for us. Sophisticated people, those who have had a formal education and live comfortable lives, may understand the need for the freedoms democracy offers but common folk don’t. It is common, around the world, to pore over opinion polls which are said to show that some citizens, usually a minority, harbour supposedly undemocratic views.  This, they imply, shows that democracy is too complicated for the masses.

That fits neatly with the prejudices of the better-off, but it does not square with the evidence. It is the supposedly smart and sophisticated holders of power, not those beneath them, who threaten democracy now, just as they always have.

Democracy is not a gift which the powerful decided to hand out to everyone below. It and the rights which go with it are the product of the people at the bottom, who were excluded because they did not have the correct parents or were poor. In the older democracies of the West, the vote and the rights which flow from it were available only to men who owned property. The well-off resisted democracy because they believed it would allow the majority to take their property. They were forced to extend these rights to everyone only because working men and women refused to accept being dominated and demanded democracy. Africans and Asians know that their colonisers denied them basic rights for which they had to fight. This also knocks on the head the claim that democracy does not work for the people – they have fought for it because, like the elites, they want the right to decide.

Even after democracy was achieved, the powerful tried to limit it as much as they could. And, when it became inconvenient, they tried to ditch it. When they succeeded, scholars and commentators often portrayed democracy’s defeat as the fault of the majority. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, democracy in Europe – one of the few places where it existed because much of the world was colonised – fell apart, leaving only a few democracies standing.  A common explanation was that, in hard times, the people lost interest in democracy.

But the political scientist Nancy Bermeo, in her book Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, showed that it wasn’t the citizenry who rejected democracy in those countries – it was the elites. Citizens were not powerful enough to defend democracy, but it ended despite them, not because of them. Nothing has changed – today, too, democracy is in trouble not because the people don’t want it but because the elites find that it gets in their way.

Two Reasons Why

There are, very broadly, two reasons why democracy is under stress.

First, groups who have always dominated in some countries fear that they may no longer be able to do this. The most obvious example is the US. In a couple of decades, whites will no longer be the majority – many whites fear they may be unable to dominate in future. They are helped by a voting system tilted in favour of parts of the US mostly inhabited by white people. There are other countries in which a dominant race or religion, or men, or the wealthy, believe they are threatened and so want democracy ended or weakened. This can be confusing at times because not everyone in the dominating group is well-off so it can be painted as a revolt by working people. But this is, nevertheless, a reaction by those who have at least some power and don’t want to lose it.

Second, the powerful have ensured that democracies don’t work for most people, which means that they don’t work as they should. An obvious example is where the elites have ensured that corruption goes unpunished. When one party is seen to be corrupt, citizens can punish it by voting for another. When they all seem to be corrupt, an anti-democrat may seem the best of a bad lot because they usually promise to clean up corruption. Elites may also fail to offer citizens protection from crime, which anti-democrats always offer to fight.  This could explain the election of anti-democrats in the Philippines and Brazil.

But these cases are the minority. More common is the many democracies in which elites have made sure that democracy does not matter. An important feature of the wave of democracy which is now in danger of ending is that it had virtually no impact at all on who benefitted from the economy: elites around the world were prepared to tolerate democracy as long as it left their economic power untouched. They made sure that inequality was not up for debate – whenever anyone threatened to raise it, a chorus of condemnation would dismiss them as crazy zealots who did not understand how economies worked. So, even mild reforms which would have addressed poverty were taken off the table – this is also a reality in this country where any proposal to tackle inequality is the target of hysterical media campaigns which whip the government into line.

Since much of the world is in poor economic shape made worse by Covid-19, citizens want governments which will improve their lives. When they don’t get them, they may well decide that politics cannot come to their aid and switch off. When anti-democrats make headway, it is usually not because people in poverty vote for them but because they are so disillusioned by democracy’s failure to make a difference that they don’t vote at all. This has happened because the organisations which enabled people to be heard have been fatally weakened, forcing them to put up with whatever the elites decide.

So, democracy’s problem is not that citizens don’t want it – it is that they lack the power to protect it. Until that changes., assaults on democracy will strengthen and grow.  In this country and the rest of the world, democracy’s health depends not on making sure that the majority think and act as the elites want. It rests on the degree to which most citizens can gain the power they need to make sure that the freedom which people at the bottom once won is not taken from them by the powerful minority who believes it is better than them.

Prof Steven Friedman is a research professor, faculty of humanities, department of politics, University of Johannesburg.