In February, at the online Munich Security Conference, President Biden insisted that democracy is at a historic inflection point. In Biden’s view, the great international task of Western society is to defend the institution of democracy against neo-authoritarian states, most notably China and Russia.
This foreign policy vision, repeated in April and again at the recent G7 summit, is reminiscent of Biden’s predecessors Woodrow Wilson and FDR. For all three, democracy is a pillar of civilization and the ultimate object of geopolitical strategy. And just like then, the threats facing democracy appear existential.
Accordingly, the time for complacency is over; but this doesn’t mean spreading democratic government at gunpoint or beating authoritarians into submission. Instead, Biden wants to prove that the system works. To paraphrase the president: if we fail to demonstrate that democracies can solve global problems and deliver tangible benefits, then the world will slip back into the chasm of autocracy.
Biden wants to prove that the system works.
For the most part, I agree with him. Allowing for local quirks and variations, democracy is the best system of government and public representation. It is imperfect – insert your preferred Churchill quip here – but at least it tries to recognize the legitimate aspirations of all citizens, thereby fostering change and renewal over time. The grass isn’t greener on the other side, autocracy is always worse.
‘Proving that the system works,’ however, requires more than simply reaffirming our established institutions. If those institutions were well suited to 21st century conditions, then we wouldn’t be in this mess. Indeed, circumstances necessitate that we reimagine and reconfigure how our government works. It has stagnated without significant structural improvement for far too long.
I don't know exactly what structural improvements need to happen. I do know that for democracy to thrive in the 21st century, it needs to confront three principal challenges.
The first is populism. I’ve written about the dangers of populism before, so I won’t beat the drum too much here. But while populism appears viscerally democratic, in practice it undermines a country’s rule-based democratic processes. Populism is by no means new to the 21st century, but the power and influence of populist politics has never been greater. We see this most dramatically in the United States, with the January 6th insurrectionists and Trump’s continued grip on the GOP. But populism is a problem in almost all major Western democracies. The UK made a generational (and terrible) decision on the basis of populist rhetoric. France and Spain have powerful populist parties; to a lesser extent Germany does too. And this is not an exclusively Western phenomenon; Brazil, the Philippines, and India all demonstrate the global extent of the populist surge.
We may hope that, in the main, such groups remain a perpetual minority, or that gradual material improvements will defuse the root cause of their rage. But it is clear that populist waves are cresting with greater frequency, leaving behind a more vindictive and radicalized body politic. So if populism remains a potent political force, democracies will only become more unstable and unproductive.
The second is social media. For years, I dismissed the political relevance of Twitter and Facebook; how could the arena of cat videos and personal stories truly undermine society? But I have changed my mind, primarily in response to the instances of foreign election interference; it is very telling that when China and Russia aim to influence an election, they primarily target websites like Facebook. It is now clear that the exponential growth of social media, once such a promising vehicle of democratic progress (for example, during the Arab Spring), corrodes the deliberative process, specifically by empowering misinformation and fostering tribal thinking. Both are destructive because they prevent the exchange of contrary opinions, leaving everyone more calcified in their beliefs. And although the views of the public have never been wholly rational or utilitarian, social media allows for misinformation and tribalism on a whole new scale. Never before has a democracy had to face a national network of individualized political bubbles; it is like living in a society where everyone has their own Platonic cave.
To be fair, most people seem highly aware of social media’s dangers. Both politicians and the courts are increasingly trying to regulate social media giants, thereby forcing such giants to police their content and modify their algorithms. This is good. Halting the fragmentation and unreality brought on by social media is a prerequisite to defusing the global authoritarian threat.
The third and final challenge is polarization. Ok, so this one is uniquely American. Indeed, perhaps no other topic has garnered as much American ink in the last twenty years. And while Biden is saying all the right things regarding the importance of bipartisanship and political goodwill (and, I think, correctly trying to back up those words with broadly popular policies), it’s a safe bet that polarization will only increase during his administration. The trouble is, how can a government function over the long term, or even consider addressing a problem like climate change, if it can’t even agree to investigate an attempted insurrection? Right now, the party out of power in America serves as little more than a perpetual agent of political sabotage – both at the federal and state level. Technically, America has seen and survived polarization like this before (see the chart below), but that was democracy of a very different nature and during a time that followed civil war; we cannot realistically hope that the present situation will improve like it did back then.
Source: https://voteview.com/articles/party_polarization
Americans hate the other party more than they love their own, and the Trump years revealed just how much madness can fester without any uptick in bipartisanship. With populism or social media, one could imagine clever electoral or legislative changes that might address the problem. But polarization remains the great unsolvable dilemma. I’m sorry Mr. President, but so long as America remains this polarized, we will find it hard to prove the system works.
Biden is correct in stating that we have reached an inflection point, but our collective reaction shouldn't simply be ‘more democracy.' Rather, it should be 'smarter democracy.' This requires thinking seriously about the shortcomings of our governing systems as they currently exist. It also requires a reevaluation of why those systems matter and what it will take to improve them.
We can no longer rest on the laurels of our presumed moral superiority. Such noble intentions will not reverse the authoritarian wave; hard, careful retooling and dogged political effort just might.
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