There is a widespread view in Britain, on both left and right, that politics has failed. Politicians promise for decades to cut immigration and it goes up. Politicians promise to cut public spending and raise it. A system that promised to respect the EU referendum then spent years trying to reverse or neuter it. Politicians who pitched themselves as jolly libertines placed the country under house arrest for months. Politicians who boast of their commitment to human rights apply blatant two-tier justice. Promises of a commitment to improve public services, stop the boats or boost GDP growth appear to deliver nothing.
Many in the political class blame the voters. They say that voters demand they do things, then if they do them those same voters hate the politicians that did it. For example, polls suggested that voters were hugely in favour of even stronger lockdowns than those delivered. Then in virtually every country they voted out the governments that had done what they demanded.
What we’re experiencing sounds like the classic 17th and 18th century critiques of democracy
Similarly, politicians say they can’t get elected without promising both low taxes and high public spending, or both tough environmental policies and higher growth. They say voters demand they be tough in dealing with rioters and those that incite riots, then as soon as the riots are over those same voters criticise the sentences doled out as too harsh.
Much of this sounds like the classic 17th and 18th century critiques of democracy. Opponents of democracy in that era feared that voters would by nature be too ill-informed to make useful decisions; that in their ignorance their political preferences would be unstable, swinging wildly from one extreme to the other — overly-harsh authoritarianism one day and soft libertine indulgence the next; that at any scale beyond a small town democracy would inevitably result in multiple factions each with their own inconsistent and incompatible preferences, making any coherent decision-making infeasible; that democracy would be inconsistent with the accumulation of property since the poor would use their voting power to confiscate the property of anyone that was becoming rich; that luxury, faction and corruption would decay governing institutions from within; that without the moral and spiritual legitimacy other systems such as monarchy or theocracy include, democracy would eat itself, rebelling unconstitutionally even though constitutional methods were available.
Democracy has had an unhappy record internationally. Yet it dominates. Perhaps the key is that it was seen as having worked in Britain (and copied by those admiring Britain) and then was imposed by Britain on other countries when Britain defeated them in wars or left them behind post-Empire.
A traditional view was that the success of British democracy was the result of four key elements. First, Britain maintained, over a long history, much the same institutions and these survived into the democratic era. When kings replaced other kings, when civil wars replaced one faction with another, and when democracy expanded, these changes all involved inheriting and using broadly the same set of evolving institutions. That created a protective inertia, tempering many of democracy’s weaknesses.
Closely connected to this was that in the UK democracy was never “pure”, and “pure” democracy was never (at least until the Blair era) widely seen as an ideal. Instead, there was a mixed constitution with an interplay between monarch, Lords, Church of England and Commons — each with their own prerogatives and areas of law where they were supreme.
Third was that in Britain liberalism grew up before democracy, so principles such as freedom of religion, of speech, from torture, of assembly and so on were long-embedded assumptions that democracy wasn’t seen as having created and had limited entitlement to dilute or remove.
The fourth element was that Britain had an underlying oligarchy, an Establishment of people with similar backgrounds, values and goals. The political parties, the civil servants, the priests, the journalists, the military officers and the academics were all chosen from this same body of people. Democratic debate occurred over matters where the Establishment itself was split or wanted a steer as to public preferences. Issues that the Establishment didn’t want to debate — e.g. capital punishment in the 1980s — weren’t democratic topics.
Now we face a crisis. Many other countries, historically, in which politics was seen as having failed as badly as ours have seen democracy replaced by communist, fascist or military coup alternatives. In other cases the country itself was subsumed into some larger state.
Much of our crisis is self-inflicted. Our Establishment stopped believing in the merits of Britain’s way of doing things and lost any mission or goal that religion, monarchy or Empire might once have provided. Our mixed institutions were hollowed out by a clash between those who believe less “Britishness” was the only legitimate way forward — the alternatives being “international law”, “human rights” or “The European Union”; and those who, partly in reaction against this, saw “more democracy” as the only form of legitimacy. Losing their sense of being part of a greater Establishment whole, politicians became more careerist and began to care more about keeping power than about delivering the change (or lack of change) that their faction believed in.
At the same time, media developments and polling techniques allowed for more and more precise reads on evolving public sentiment. That amplified the combined effects of the other changes to create more sensitivity to rapidly shifting democratic preferences.
Many young people in Britain have come to favour alternatives to democracy such as absolute monarchy. In Japan the Upper Chamber now includes a representative of a political party committed to rule by Artificial Intelligence. Some thinkers have started arguing that democracy was a product of the age of literacy and long-form reading and that in a digital age in which people are losing the appetite (and perhaps even ability) to read long-form, citizens are likely to prefer systems such as absolute monarchy.
In my view, the continuation of democracy should not be a goal but would be a likely by-product of the better goal: that our Establishment rediscover or be given a proper purpose or mission. That could be a change in religion (if Christianity is no longer an option), a role in some civilisational goal such as the human conquest of Mars or something else entirely — like “The Glory of Rome”. But without a mission our Establishment cannot have that coherence and inertia that traditionally protected us from democracy’s weaknesses and made democracy useful. If our Establishment cannot find or be given such a mission, British democracy may fade away, perhaps more rapidly than many expect, or create here many of democracy’s worst disasters for many decades to come.
