10 Ideas to Fix Democracy
Foreign Policy asked leading thinkers for their best (and sometimes uncomfortable) advice.
For 15 consecutive years, Freedom House’s annual tally has recorded a decline in the number of democracies worldwide. It’s a steady loss of ground that Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University, calls a “democratic recession.” And no event put the reality of democratic backsliding more dramatically on display than the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—when the world’s oldest liberal democracy endured the first violent presidential transition in its 245-year history. As we mark that event’s dubious anniversary, we’re reminded how fragile democracy really is.
GENERAL PERSPECTIVE REGARDING DEMOCRATIC RECESSION
Democracy is on the defensive, and the reasons are as deep as they are familiar. Growing inequality has fed a global mood that democratic institutions aren’t serving their citizens. The internet and social media have hypercharged political polarization and cultural divides, which populists easily exploit. Mass immigration and rapid demographic shifts have empowered extremists. Around the world, authoritarian regimes have seized the West’s weakness as an opportunity to expand their influence. Autocrats are winning admirers in the West, too: In an ever more complex world facing generational threats—from pandemics to climate change—the speed and totality with which autocracies can implement decisions has some wondering if messy, deliberative, compromise-seeking democracy can still do the job. In a June 2021 poll, a slight majority of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 had a favorable view of socialism, suggesting that younger generations in Western democracies are increasingly open to alternative systems of governance.
All this is a call for action. Foreign Policy brought together 10 prominent thinkers to share their most important fixes to reform the workings of democracy, defend it against its enemies at home and abroad, and ensure it survives and thrives by better serving the people it governs.
REQUIRED STEPS
Several themes emerge.
The most urgent fixes obviously begin at home, starting with ways to lessen the inequities of 21st-century capitalism.
Technology is an urgent field for policy action, as the toxic discourse abetted by social media and the dangers of hacking, spyware, surveillance, and disinformation demonstrate.
Following a year that saw a nationalist insurrection in the United States and the continued strength of anti-immigrant populists in Europe, several of our contributors focus on how racial and other social divisions might be addressed.
And in light of the growing conflict between democratic and autocratic powers, it’s no surprise that better defenses against external threats—from weaponized corruption to election interference—rank high among the writers’ concerns as well. We asked the participants to be as prescriptive and radical as possible. Their responses show that the task is huge and the fixes are tentative at best.
Perhaps the one thing missing from the debate is a call to stop acting as if democracy were doomed. It might help to recall that the history of democracy fatigue is as old as democracy itself: In 1787, Benjamin Franklin predicted that the American republic would soon end in despotism, “when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.” History went on to tell another story. Despite its well-documented flaws and constant need for reinvention, liberal democracy has brought civil rights, political participation, social mobility, and economic opportunity to once-disenfranchised masses and minorities. Around the world, poor and autocratic countries might gladly take Moscow’s mercenaries and Beijing’s money, but it’s still Western-style democracy to which their citizens aspire. As Anders Fogh Rasmussen writes in this issue, “People rarely take to the streets demanding more autocracy.” A little more confidence could go a long way as democracy writes its next chapter.—Stefan Theil, deputy editor
Abolish Two-Party Systems
By Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America
One cannot make sense of the current crisis of liberal democracy without understanding the seismic economic and demographic shifts that have transformed Western democracies. Today, economic opportunity is heavily concentrated in major cities. A new urban elite—much more multicultural, diverse, and cosmopolitan—is redefining cultural norms and rearranging traditional hierarchies of race and gender.
MORE PARTIES SYSTEM NEEDED
Left behind are those who stayed in the rural and post-industrial hinterlands, where globalization has not been kind. Here, far-right populists recasting themselves as defenders of national greatness and a bygone order have flourished, especially among white men. The leaders of such movements are cold to the traditional values of liberal democracy, with its emphasis on diversity and tolerance and its embrace of a market capitalism that has hit these regions hardest.
In the United States and Britain, Trumpism and Brexit are both clear manifestations and fierce accelerators of a dangerous us-versus-them divide that is hitting right at the heart of liberal democracy.
Other countries have been spared such shocks. Nationalist or far-right parties such as Alternative for Germany, the Sweden Democrats, the Dutch Party for Freedom, and the Danish People’s Party have galvanized voters in their countries’ left-behind regions. But so far, they’ve been kept out of government, rejected by at least three-quarters of voters.
The difference? The United States and Britain have first-past-the-post elections, which organize conflict around just two parties and force voters into two competing camps. Though the Brexit referendum didn’t perfectly map onto the Labour-Conservative divide at the time, it accelerated a divisive polarization that now defines British partisan politics.
In an earlier period, when national politics in most Western countries was dominated by a large moderate center, two-party and multiparty systems proved equally adept in holding together a rough national consensus. But today, with urban-rural cultural conflicts driving political competition, majoritarian democracies are amplifying and escalating the zero-sum fights between progressive urban elites and a resentment-driven rural populist right, with no release valve or opportunity for a new center to emerge.
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
Voting reform can help. The proportional democracies of northern Europe, after all, are more effectively riding out the storms of authoritarian populism. There, center-right voters have been able to support center-right parties without supporting illiberalism, and more flexible multiparty systems have facilitated new coalitions to keep illiberal forces out of power.
The idea of introducing proportional representation in the United States and Britain is hardly new. What’s new is the context. Cultural, educational, and geographic divides are likely to shape politics for decades to come. A two-party system that by definition splits a country in half will reinforce and deepen identity polarization, pushing national politics even further into trench warfare. Proportional systems are far from perfect. But they allow for new and shifting coalitions that can help liberal democracies navigate these difficult circumstances. Most importantly, they avoid the binary winner-take-all conflict that so easily lets politics slip into an irresolvable zero-sum contest of us against them—a toxic polarization that even long-established democracies such as the United States and Britain may not survive.
Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
By Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
Surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time, and it is on a collision course with democracy. Surveillance capitalism’s giants—1. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple—now own, operate, and intermediate nearly every aspect of human engagement with global information and communication systems, unconstrained by public law.
2. All roads to economic, social, and even political participation now lead through a handful of unaccountable companies, a condition that has intensified during two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The result is a trail of social wreckage:
1. the wholesale destruction of privacy, 2.
2. vast corporate concentrations of information about people and society,
3. poisoned discourse,
4. fractured societies,
5. remote systems of behavior manipulation, and
6. weakened democratic institutions.
While the Chinese designed and deployed digital technologies to advance their own system of authoritarian rule, the West failed to construct a coherent vision of a digital century that advances democratic principles and government.
Rights and laws once codified to protect citizens from industrial capitalism—such as antitrust law and workers’ rights—do not shield us from these harms. If the ideal of the people’s self-governance is to survive this century, then a democratic counterrevolution is the only solution.
U.S. and European lawmakers have finally begun to think seriously about regulating privacy and content, but they have yet to reckon with the far more basic question of how to structure and govern information and communication for a democratic digital future.
Three principles offer a starting point.
First, the democratic rule of law governs. There is no so-called cyberspace immune to rights and laws, which must apply to every domain of society, whether populated by people or machines. Publishers, for example, are held accountable for the information they publish. Surveillance capitalists have no such accountability, even though their profit-maximizing algorithms enable and exploit disinformation.
Second, unprecedented harms demand unprecedented solutions. Existing antitrust laws can be used to break up the tech giants, but that won’t address the underlying economics. The target must be the secret extraction of human data once considered private. Democracies must outlaw this extraction, end the corporate concentration of personal information, eliminate targeting algorithms, and abolish corporate control of information flows.
Third, new conditions require new rights. Our era demands the codification of epistemic rights—the right to know and decide who knows what about our lives. These elemental rights are not codified in law because they have never before come under systemic threat. They must be codified if they are to exist at all.
We can be a surveillance society, or we can be a democracy—but we cannot be both. Democracy is a fragile political condition dedicated to the prospect of self-governance, sheltered by the principle of justice, and maintained by collective effort. Each generation’s mission is always the same: to protect and keep democracy moving forward in a relay race against anti-democratic forces that spans centuries. The liberal democracies have the power and legitimacy to lead against surveillance capitalism—and to do so on behalf of all peoples struggling against a dystopian future.
Break Down the Barriers
By Eduardo Porter, economics reporter at the New York Times
The most insidious threat to Western liberal democracies doesn’t come from China or Russia but from within: from the dread their white majorities feel as demographic change puts their grip on power at risk. The urge of white, Christian native populations to circle the wagons against Black and other racial minorities and increasingly non-Christian immigrants has fueled illiberal politics from the United States to Europe, opening the door to autocratic politicians who promise to protect the volk.
This presents a particularly complicated challenge for the liberal order because demographic change will not be stopped. In the United States, the non-Hispanic white population will slip into minority status in a couple of decades—regardless of future immigration trends. Immigration to Western Europe is increasing despite all efforts to keep outsiders at bay. Saving liberal democracy, given this inexorable demographic reconfiguration, requires that we build a sense of shared citizenship that can survive the reallocation of power.
This is highly improbable. In the United States, the most ethnically diverse of the Western democracies, the debate over the nation’s racial divisions has no center. The left demands redress from white people for the centuries of oppression that various groups have faced. The right doesn’t believe those groups have a legitimate claim. Communities of color in European countries may benefit from their more robust social safety nets. But immigrants’ claim on public goods is resented, and their claim to broader citizenship and belonging are flatly denied.
It is easier to identify pitfalls than to propose an effective way out. The anti-racism proposed by some activists on the U.S. left is divisive by design—cleaving the nation into antagonistic racist and anti-racist camps. The demand for reparations to be paid to the descendants of enslaved people, moral though it may be, is equally contentious. Clearly, building a more cohesive nation requires reducing the United States’ gargantuan inequalities of income and wealth. But imagine how a $10 trillion reparations bill would shape the politics of the 63 million non-Hispanic white people who voted for then-U.S. President Donald Trump in 2020, many of whom perceive themselves under threat by their country’s racial transformation.
Those 63 million American voters—like the millions of voters for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the Dutch Party for Freedom, or the Sweden Democrats—must be part of the conversation. Liberal democracy cannot be saved without finding better ways to include the angry citizens threatening to bring it down.
How do we do that? Policies to counter residential segregation, including incentives to build affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods, would help. So would efforts to integrate schools that have become increasingly segregated by race and class. A program of national service requiring every 18-year-old to work on community projects and build public goods could mix young people from all backgrounds and help start urgently needed conversations across identity frontiers. The broader objective is to build an inclusive citizenship. Living next to each other, going to school together, and sharing the granular challenges of life are just a few ways to start to humanize each other.
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