How Democracy (Really) Dies

Sam Amadi

On Monday, the Brazilian Supreme Court was reported to have approved the ruling of a judge in Brazil banning Brazilians from making use of the Elon Musk’s microblog site, X. Elon Musk has been in running battle with Brazilian authorities over the latter’s allegation that the former has used his online platform to spread falsehoods against the government. In the past, falsehood used to be countered with truth. Today, views and opinions adjudged to be false by authorities in liberal democracies are not countered, they are criminally indicted. It is a matter of poetic irony that on the same day that the Brazilian Supreme Court reportedly issued the order criminalizing inconvenient speech, the Nigerian government arraigned 10 citizens who participated in the ‘end bad governance’ protests on a charge of treason. Treason carries a death penalty. So, the Nigerian government’s response to a politically inconvenient protest is to seek the court’s order to hang the protesters. Some in the Brazilian government are bracing up to arrest and prosecute Elon Musk for providing a platform that is adjudged to enable false information. Now, be careful. False information could mean any statement that does not agree with the official information.

It is also interesting that the US government, that self-acclaimed undertaker of democratization, has not made any statement condemning the threatened prosecution of an American for free speech or the Nigeria’s government prosecution of protesters. The administration in Washington has even expressed its delight to have the microblog X scrambled and Elon Musk prosecuted. It is not because it is busy that the Biden-Kamala administration has not bothered to react to many of these threats against free speech. It is a principled and strategic silence.

The Biden-Harris administration seems to have some problems with free speech. Many high officials of that administration have called for the arrest and prosecution of Elon Musk. Although, they continue to use X to promote their views about social and economic affairs, they do not hide their dislike of Elon Musk for buying the microblog site and the removing the restrictions against dangerous and false information. Before Musk, President Trump was yanked off the site for posts unaccepted to the influential liberals who controlled the site. The reality of the most powerful man in history having his voice suppressed alarmed many conservatives who had complained that many conservatives were blocked from expressing their views on the excuse of extremism. Elon Musk removed that ideological filter. This is why he now represents a threat to society. Kamara Harris, the Vice President and the Democratic Party’s candidate for the November presidential election has not hidden her opposition to Elon Musk and his X. Professor Robert Reich, a leading liberal and former Clinton Secretary of Commerce, notably called for the arrest of Elon Musk for promoting views that he considers dangerous and enable extremist opinion on his microblog.

Why is the US government less concerned about assaults against free speech across the world? This is unlike it. The US government is notorious for its propensity to intervene across the world in purported defense of democratic right. Is free speech no longer a fundamental democratic right? Or is democracy no longer that important? Why is the government not bothered about threats by political authorities in notable western democracies against free speech? My view is that this change is evidence that the US government is in pursuit of something more important than freedom of speech. For instance, the US government’s official communication shows that protecting transgenders, and promoting gender transition are more important concerns than protecting free speech. It has taken drastic actions against countries that are reported to criminalize homosexual relations or are denying official recognition to transgender interests. It looks like many in western government consider free speech the real enemy to fight.

The irony is that free speech, together with the right to life and the right to freedom of opinion, is the most basic democratic right. So, the demise of free speech is in many ways the demise of democracy. This knowledge is basic in public understanding of democracy. If the US government do not care about it, it suggests that something is going on. We need to know what it is. Is democracy no longer important? Are we now in a post-democracy era in human history?

After the first tenure of Mr. Donald Trump as the President of the United States of America, there arose a cottage industry of democracy pessimism. Many political scientists wrote books about the end of democracy. The three most notable of the books of this new genre are ‘How Democracy Ends’ by David Runciman,  ‘How Democracies Die: What History Reveal About Our Future’ by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and Crises of Democracy by Adam Przeworski. There was so much glib talk about how democracy ends and the such. In 2020 Biden defeated Trump and we did not see any such frenzy again. It looked like the threat to democracy was no more. Trump was that singular threat that provoked the rise of the literature of the end of democracy. But was Trump really a threat to democracy? Or was a narrative crafted by resentment and hatred for Mr. Trump and what he represents?

Just a little point about the literature of the ‘How Democracy Dies’ epidemics. In Runciman’s view, three events announce the end of democracy. Democracy ends when a coup uproots the foundations of a democratic regime. It is usually quick, violent and unannounced. In the past, coups against democracy involved “tanks surrounded the city overnight and soldiers were sent to seize communication points, including the radio and television stations and post office”. Anyone in Africa who is above 30 years is familiar with these situations. Today, coup don’t come unannounced and quick. They creep in through multiple ways unnoticed when strong leaders erode the guardrails. As Runciman wisely puts it, “some coups need to make clear that democracy is over to succeed, and some coups need to pretend that democracy is still intact”. 

Another way democracy comes to an end is through a catastrophic event. Catastrophe drains us of civic energy and imposes an urgency that may lead to the dismantling of the democratic state. Runciman quotes Eliane Scarry in her book, Thermo-nuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom, that “Nuclear weapons undo governments and undo anything that could be meant by democracy”. He references Hannah Arendt’s powerful insight that modern democracy entrenches mindlessness which often leads to failure to preempt disasters. So democracy can end when it confronts a disaster that requires more than democratic habits. To choose to avoid either doom or democracy, many people will choose democracy.

Technology can also upend democracy. It does so when it drains democratic politics of its civic character and the moral authenticity and replaces it with plastic machination. Runciman quotes Ghandi to argue that “Representative democracy was wholly artificial. It had become a thrall to machines. It operated through the party machine, the bureaucratic machine, the money machine. Citizens were passive consumers of their own political destiny. We press a button and we expect government to respond. It is no surprise that we are disappointed. What we get instead is cheap promises and outright lies”. The implication of ‘technological takeover’ of politics is that politics become boring and boorish. It has no truth, soul or authenticity. Network replaces neighborhood; and majority rule is replaced by the rule of the few who are technological adroit.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write about the lessons of history about how democracy dies. Their main thesis is that democracy dies when elected officials turn around and undermine democracy. “Blatant dictatorship- in the form of fascism, communism or military rule- has disappeared across the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracy still dies but by a different means”. Adam Przeworski sees the crisis of democracy as sign that democracy would “gradually and scrumptiously deteriorate”. The key point is that deterioration is usually seen as the handiwork of rightwing conservatives, extremists who would destroy freedom. But is that really how it is turning out?

These books on how democracy ends or dies always use Trump as the signal figure who prefigures these threats. The COVID 19 pandemic further etched in black on white canvas the ‘evil’ that Trump posed to democracy. Trump seemed to have doubted the efficacy of modern science. He allegedly assembled and platformed assorted pseudo-scientists and extremists who questioned venerable personages like Dr. Fauci and the bureaucrats at the World Health Organization (WHO) and disputed their prescribed modalities and vaccines for the virus. Let us forget for a moment that Dr. Fauci and his venerable colleagues have walked back on tens of what they said were scientifically proven about the virus. Today, some of the so-called conspiracies from Trump-like scientists have now being accepted by mainstream scientific sources as authentic.

Now that Trump is back to fight for the presidency with a message that challenges the liberal global coalition that calls the shot in international public policy, the noble men and women of Davos, the real undertakers of whatever remains of the ‘Washington Consensus’, are once again, chanting ‘Trump is a threat to democracy’. The way the anti-Trump elites paint a scary picture of the end of democracy if Trump gets a second term as US President, you would assume we never had a Trump first term. Trump definitely threatened to end many things important to the global elites , like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and cozied up to dictators like Putin and Kim Jong of North Korea. But he did not throw political opponents into prison. He did not abolish any of the constitutional rights of the US citizens? He did not use state power to expel elected representatives from Congress. He did not enact decrees in place of laws passed by Congress. He did none of these. Yet Trump represents the most credible threat against democracy.

Anyone who studies American constitutional law would argue that, arguably, President Obama, the posterchild of democracy, issued more executive orders that threatened liberties of American citizens than President Trump. Some of these executive actions were successfully challenged at the Supreme Court. Obama’s regulatory state was more incursive than Trump’s in many ways. Yet, Trump continues to represent the archetypical threat to democracy. Maybe he is. But that would be construing democracy in a tendentious manner. 

Trump may be odd and weird as democrats claim. But Trump is not the President of Brazil where a judge has banned Brazilians from expressing themselves through the X platform. A few weeks ago, the founder of Telegram was arrested in Paris and is undergoing criminal prosecution for what appears to be trumped up charge that belies the truth that government officials are angry at the platform for not censoring what they consider misinformation and disinformation. A few weeks ago, a top official of the EU fired a warning against Elon Musk to stop his proposed interview with President Trump on his X platform to avoid serious consequences. This was a barely concealed attempt to censor a political viewpoint from a man running for the US Presidency. Apart from constituting a veiled election interference, the threat betrays a mindset that is poised against some perspectives considered as ‘dangerous’ to society. What makes these perspectives dangerous in the mind of the ruling elites in the west is that they are frontally opposed to some dominant liberal projects. Think about the war in Ukraine. It is reasonable to think that the west should support Ukraine to defeat Russia. It is also reasonable to argue against continuing the war against Russia. None of these views constitutes a real threat to democracy.

The global liberal elites have constructed democracy to mean some important agenda that override the basic rights and freedoms that are traditionally associated with the democracy. Some political theorists are wondering whether democracies needs to accord tolerance to those who oppose the ‘democratic’ life. This has always been an issue in establishing the coherence of liberal theory. But it is now being implemented as a programmatic shutting down of ideas and viewpoints that contradict the ideas and viewpoints of dominant liberals. Take for example, views about homosexuality or transgender. Some western countries have enacted laws that  criminalize failure to address transgenders by their preferred pronouns. The renowned writer, J.K. Rowling, is threatened with criminal prosecution by Scottish authorities for refusing to accept that transwomen are women. The Vice President of Google startled many when he defended the IT company’s overt manipulation of its algorithm to block certain facts from public search by saying that accuracy is not as important as the project.

There is no doubt that the left in the west have problem with the traditional concept of democracy to include the necessity for freedom of opinion and expression. They have problem with constitutional democracy if it means that the people may elect those who do not accept their comprehensive moral doctrines. This century’s leading political philosopher, John Rawls, propounded a theory of justice that is based on the liberal faith that civil society can have reasoned coexistence with those who reject the liberal canons. He argued that this is feasible though the overlapping consensus in which liberal and non-liberals can bracket their comprehensive moral doctrines and engage contractarian views on the basis of public reason. In his book, The Law of the Peoples, he showed how to build a just and peaceful social order through such epistemic abstinence.

The possibility of an overlapping consensus has been one of the core faiths of modern political liberalism. It is not based on forceful repressing of a viewpoint considered wrong or false, but the construction of a public good accessible from all divergent reasonable comprehensive doctrines. This means that a platform like X should allow divergent, even incommensurable, perspectives without suppressing any. But modern left liberals do not believe this anymore. They are clamoring for stronger censorship for fear of the presumed damage that unregulated free speech could cause. But the lesson of history is clear: on the whole there is more harm with suppression of speech and control of channels of expression by a person or group of persons than by expression or falsehood or hate speech. Yes, some speeches could be dangerous. But freedom of speech should be continually protected. Democracy, properly understood prioritizes self-determination over safety, of the city or of the ideology. It we no longer believe in this prioritization, then we should become China.

It is evident that many of the new liberal lefts have abandoned this naive faith in the priority of democracy in pursuit of the project of establishing a social order that protect their substantive vision of the good. To implement this, the need to take out those who oppose their project. They are willing to abandon democracy to protect the emerging woke and radical agenda. This is like the former communists who railed against democracy because the freedom that liberal democracy offers are superficial. As some of them argued, the right of man in a bourgeois society is just an illusory right. Today’s ‘neo-Marxist’ in the guise of the liberal extreme left argue that freedom of speech undermines real freedoms. For these extreme left ideologues, democracy is not as important as the project. Just as the Google exec put it, ‘The project is more important than accuracy”.

Free speech and freedom of expression are cornerstones of democracy. They are the engine of innovation. There are obvious dangers that ignorant and provocative speeches pose to society. These dangers are preventable and manageable through legal and social measures that do not require the suppression of speech. The presumption is that the most potent threat to democracy comes from the extreme right who resents the democratic way and values. These fascists elements are the killers of democracy. So reads the literature of ‘how democracy ends’. But the true situation is different. Trump and his right-wingers may not be the most potent threat to democracy. That dishonor now belongs to the radical left.

Today, democracy is dying in the West. Surprisingly, it is dying at the hands of the radical left. This truth is not captured in the literature of How Democracy Dies. That literature needs an update. It is the extreme left (not the extreme right) that is (really) killing democracy.