Liberal Democracy as a Dictatorship of Minorities
The geopolitical tug-of-war between liberal and electoral democracies is a bigger problem for the West than the “democracies v. autocracies” confrontation.
Since Woodrow Wilson's 1917 speech in which he promised Americans to “make the world safe for democracy”, Democratic presidents have - with one exception- been the ones in charge of the worldwide promotion of democracy agenda. After more than a hundred years since then, these efforts have finally proved successful : since the 1989 revolutions in Europe, for the first time in history the number of democracies has surpassed the number of states classed as authoritarian or dictatorships.
However, success has not come easy in the fight to spread democracy, quite on the contrary. The destruction of the authoritarian German Empire, for example, created the conditions for the rise to power of Hitler, whose dictatorship proved much more dangerous for Europeans and Americans alike than the Kaiser’s political regime.
Although after 1989 the number of democracies has surpassed other types of political systems (authoritarian, communist) for the first time, the fact is that today the majority of them are not liberal, but electoral democracies, as Dani Rodrik has pointed out in his study. Liberal democracies, as Rodrik explains, are peculiar only to Western Europe where liberalism and civil rights appeared first, with electoral (political) rights having been granted much later, mostly during the first half of the 20th century.
By contrast, electoral democracies have granted electoral and social rights first, without necessarily guaranteeing civil rights such as same-sex marriage or equality before the law for some ethnic minorities. This is the result of their historical evolution. Industrialization or decolonisation would not have been possible without first empowering the majority of the population politically and granting it social rights.
For any democracy - whether liberal or electoral - to function, however, a compromise between its players has to be reached, which protects the rights of minorities as well as those of the majority.
As compared to electoral democracies, which are biased towards protecting the political and social rights of the majority of their citizens, liberal democracies are also geared towards protecting and enlarging the rights of minorities, be they ethnic or sexual.
Rare as they are, liberal democracies appeared in the West in a specific context in which the owners of capital - or "the rich" - had succeeded in gaining or retaining political power with the support of a limited number of voters. Thus in 19th century France, after 2 revolutions (1789 and 1830) only citizens who earned a certain amount of money were allowed to vote. The rest of the citizens, as advised by prime minister Guizot at the time, had "to get rich first" if they wanted to participate in the political life of the country.
By restricting the right to vote through a variety of methods, the nascent elites of Western liberal democracies were thus for a long time able to deny political rights to the many, as well as to avoid any responsibility for the social havoc that capitalist industrial development played during the first century or so of its existence.
Gradually and grudgingly, especially after the first world war, liberal elites were forced to concede voting rights and participation in political decision-making to the majority of the population, including to women.
For a few decades after the second world war, the balance of power inside most Western nations shifted in favour of majorities, whose working and living conditions improved dramatically. Politicians representing voter majorities were at that time able to impose a heavy taxation burden on the rich, sometimes as high as 90 percent of profits, where there were none at the beginning of the 20th century.
The rich minorities' reaction was slow in coming but- through its consequences- it had drastic effects on the living standards of the majority of voters in Western nations. Through the adoption and subsequent promotion of neoliberal economic policies pioneered by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, the "1 percent" minority in society were able to reverse earlier elevated tax policies and, during the following decades, to reduce taxes back to levels unseen since the early 1900s.
Second, they have all but dismantled the trade union movement in the West, which was the backbone of the political parties of the left and instrumental in obtaining favourable compensation for labour from the owners of capital.
The third and most peculiar way of advancing the political agenda of the rich minority has been by joining forces with leaders of other minorities, who had hitherto faced discrimination by majorities. Think here the LGBT community, some -albeit not all- ethnic minorities, and radicalised women.
From a military perspective, for most of the 20th century, Western liberal democracies reacted militarily only when challenged by imperial or Nazi Germany or Soviet communism. In the euphoria generated by the fall of Communist regimes in Europe and the implosion of the USSR from 1991, however, the situation changed dramatically. The most significant changes took place in the US, where during the last decade of the 20th century both American political parties were infiltrated by neoconservative intellectuals, bent on spreading democracy by military means.
If towards the end of the 20th century the rich minority exercised its control and promoted its agenda via the outright purchase of mainstream politicians on both sides of the political aisle, during the last two decades we observe a tendency to promote to power leaders who belong to minority groups: either to the LGBT community (like in France,Ireland,Serbia , Latvia or Luxemburg); or members of the billionaire elite (Berlusconi, Babis of Czechia ); or selected members of ethnic minorities ( Obama or Harris in the US, Sunak or Gething in the UK, Zelensky, Iohannis).
Together, these minorities show signs of becoming dictatorial when their new DEI agenda is challenged by representatives of the majority. Thus, freedom of speech has been curtailed, the mainstream culture and history of Americans or Europeans is under “revision”, discrimination in employment against white applicants is becoming the norm in the largest global corporations. (To enforce this policy, a significant number of CEO’s of global corporations have been imported in countries like the US, but also Switzerland or France, from Third World countries such as India.)
There is but one similar, although not identical, historical precedent for this veritable crisis of liberal democracies that comes to mind. Thus, after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Soviet communists promoted in top positions representatives of ethnic minorities hitherto marginalised ,such as Stalin, Drzezinski, Beria and others.
In the West, the fight between these minorities and the majority of the population has now spilled out onto the streets, as the main institutions in our democracies - including parliaments- have ceased to work the way they were supposed to and are under constant threat.
Far from liberal democracy becoming the norm of the democratic world, however, what we are witnessing these days is a widespread reluctance outside the West - in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova - to emulate it as the model of democracy. Even in the West, liberal democracy is being challenged by the political representatives of a majority of voters. Repeatedly labelled as "populists" or "illiberal", the new breed of politicians spearheading this movement is here to stay and to expand both their influence and power, as the latest political developments in Western Europe amply demonstrate.
To be sure, today’s Western elites are not truly afraid that the populist wave would change their political systems into Chinese or Russian-style autocracies. The main danger for them is that one nation after another could ditch the liberal democracy model in favour of electoral democracy. In other words, contrary to current propaganda, their real enemies are not Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, but political leaders like Turkey’s Erdogan, Orban of Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, and so on. As leaders of successful electoral democracies, these politicians are frequently demonised by the obedient media in Washington and Brussels.
Undaunted about the profound crisis experienced by the liberal democratic model, its current American promoters are waging yet another crusade aimed at spreading it in Ukraine and beyond. Russia is one target that comes to mind.
As all prior efforts to spread democracy by military means have failed, this ill-inspired drive should be abandoned altogether. Alas, such political wisdom is unfortunately in short supply on the corridors of power in Washington or Brussels.
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Don’t miss the sequel to this post: There Is Life After Liberal Democracy