Over the last half-decade, Western leaders have repeatedly intoned the idea that the world is engaged in an epochal ‘battle between democracy and autocracy’. In this defining battle, the former camp (mainly the United States of America and Europe) is meant to stand for the principles of popular sovereignty, democratic freedoms, and a rules-based global order whereas the latter camp (mainly Russia and China) is perceived to be the bastion of elite rule, State coercion, and external aggression.
The West-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and now the pre-emptive war with Iran have thoroughly drained this simplistic framing of legitimacy. The extensive military and diplomatic support of Western states for Israel’s wars lies in stark contrast to the expressed will of their own populations as noted in repeated surveys. There are whispers that the White House is preparing for imminent airstrikes on Iran, a measure which is overwhelmingly opposed by the public, including the Republican base of President Donald Trump.
In both the US and Europe, pro-Palestine protests have been subjected to criminalisation and State violence. The US has slapped sanctions on the judges of the International Criminal Court for its indictment of top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes in Gaza. Meanwhile, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has commended Netanyahu for carrying out the “dirty work” of the world (West) through its unprovoked (and hence illegal) war of aggression against Iran.
On the basis of the evidence above, the prevailing systems of power termed democracy and autocracy hardly appear to be polar opposites. Instead, they lie on a hazy continuum, both increasingly converging on their imperious exercise of State power. One may call them ‘managed democracy’ and ‘managed autocracy’.
In his book, Democracy Incorporated, the Princeton political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin, had diagnosed this tendency of democracy to hollow out from within, through a steady erosion of checks and balances, into a form of “managed democracy”. The case that Wolin studied was post-9/11 American democracy wherein he explained how a passive public came to be shepherded by a ruling elite. Provocatively, he termed the American system of power as approaching a state of “inverted totalitarianism” in contrast to the “classic totalitarianism” of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. Inverted totalitarianism, for Wolin, doesn’t require the suspension of the formal institutions of democracy. This is because totalising authority in the contemporary world need not be exercised through a centralised party apparatus but can be effectively projected through a variety of nodes across a hybrid State-corporate network. Whereas the totalitarian managers of the last century whipped the public into conformity through ideological extremism and overt terror, their present-day counterparts lean more on mass consumerism and media spectacles. According to Wolin, this was an altogether novel “type of political system, seemingly one driven by abstract totalizing powers, not by personal rule, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, that relies more on ‘private’ media than on public agencies.”
The radical critique of Wolin is particularly insightful to understand how today’s ingenious ‘autocratisers’ have found it relatively easy to suborn democratic institutions to their will, whether Trump in America or Narendra Modi in India. The liberal critique of these leaders has focused inordinately on their unrestrained exercise of State power in violation of constitutionally-protected civil liberties and their attempts to force their diktats on independent media, judiciary and business. That critique, however, hasn’t found much purchase with the popular sectors. One reason is that it fails to recognise how the supposed ‘coercion’ of business and media can be more accurately described as a ‘co-option’ or a ‘co-habitation’. When TV channels owned by business tycoons fall over each other in praising the achievements of the prime minister, or when they closely follow the political agenda set by the ruling party, what we witness instead is a symbiotic fusion of concentrated corporate and political power. Another reason for this popular apathy has been succinctly captured by the political scientist, Larry Bartels: “One of the primary lessons of experience in democratic systems is that citizens care much more about outcomes than about procedures.”
As Wolin noted, to recover the democratic project, we first need to rediscover the substantive conception of democracy rather than merely focus on its procedural aspects. It is worth quoting him at some length on this point: “What was democracy supposed to bring into the world that was not there before? A short answer might be this: democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality, and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common life and its forms of self-fulfilment.”
In other words, as per the substantive conception, democracy is an instrument for the powerless to attain a measure of equality, dignity, and justice that are routinely denied to them not just by the State but also by powerful private actors (such as employers). A democratic critique of power hierarchies must therefore be alive to the workings of oppressive power that are most relevant to the majority of citizens. Here, we can turn to the famous characterisation of the “three dimensions of power” by the British political theorist, Steven Lukes.
According to this framework, the open contestation over policy choices seen in Parliament or the media comprises only a superficial dimension (the proverbial tip of the iceberg) of the exercise of power in society. The much more important dimensions of power lie beneath the surface, hidden from the popular gaze. These are the powers exercised through agenda control, ensuring that a whole range of issues with potential popular acceptability never make it to the stage of meaningful institutional deliberation. Consider the fact that wealth/inheritance taxes, a staple of East Asian political systems, hardly ever become subjects of democratic discussion in a deeply unequal country like India. Or the near absence of partisan contestation over the quality of and access to critical public goods such as healthcare, education, clean air and drinking water. Over the last few decades, there has been a wholescale ‘outsourcing’ of State functions and services to an array of private consultancies, corporations, and NGOs without so much as a meaningful public debate, notwithstanding the obvious implications of this emerging ‘hybrid State’ for the goals of access, participation and equity.
Then there is the deepest dimension of power — ideological power —where elitist control is exercised over the grounding symbols and myths through which we ‘recognise the world’ and which shapes our identity and desires. It is through this symbolic dimension that political elites work to foment ideological extremism over ‘cultural issues’ alongside popular apathy over ‘material issues’.
When the ‘demos’ (ordinary people) are systematically denied access to State power, prevented from participation in political life, and cast off from the protection of social programmes, it is hardly any wonder that they become ‘depoliticised’ and uninvested in the preservation of procedural democracy. In her survey of 20th-century breakdowns of democracy in Europe and Latin America, the political scientist, Nancy Bermeo, concluded that political elites rather than ordinary citizens are generally “the key actors” in precipitating transitions from democracy to dictatorship. “Democracies will only collapse if actors deliberately disassemble them, and the key actors in this disassembling process are political elites.” Across the world, from America to Europe to India, democracies have entered a gloomy sunset, not just from the malicious actions of the ‘autocratisers’ but also because of the feckless inaction of their liberal opponents.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
