Is democracy dying?

Everybody wanted action, but Nobody wanted to act. Anon

Over the past two years my sense of belonging to a liberal democracy has fallen apart. Until then, I’d basked in a lifelong feeling of security that my ability to amble down a London street breathing God’s fresh air was my birthright as a freeborn English woman. And as a child wandering the fields of Gloucestershire, I intuitively knew a truth well understood by indigenous peoples: simply by virtue of being human, I had a right to be on the earth.

Adult life, teaching political philosophy and reporting on policymaking, added layers of words, concepts and processes of reasoning to this lived experience. I learned that preserving the sense of the-right-to-be that came with being alive was part of a struggle against tyranny that had pervaded human history: there had always been those who sought to disrupt the relationship between self and world, whether out of a desire for resources or to exert control. I understood that Western societies had made irreversible progress in this respect, devising a system of governance with inbuilt protections against the all-too-human tendency to dominate others. It was finally understood that power resided with the people and, when handed to leaders, was always done on a conditional, limited and temporary basis. The system that enshrined this, with its constitutions, declarations of rights and separations of powers, was formal and abstract compared to the sacred relationship between human and the life force experienced by ancient peoples, but it suited the complexity of the modern world and had its own beauty. And then my political innocence shattered.

The moment of shattering came when two policemen walked across a deserted park to tell me, a lone Englishwoman, that I no longer had the right to be outside.

The incident was part of a seismic shift that took place in almost all Western democracies in the early months of 2020, a shift from the belief that rights are inherent, held by the people individually and collectively, to the idea that rights are granted or withheld by the governing powers. At the time, you remember, the assurance was that the suspension of rights was but temporary, done for an exceptional reason that would soon pass. But as time went on and politicians, the media and big business talked of the need for new restrictions for a variety of reasons, from flu to flight emissions, it became clear that a potentially lasting shift in the balance of power was underway.

My recent return to Britain confirmed that this was happening apace in the cradle of Western democracy. The government may be in crisis, but Boris Johnson’s recent resignation was not about Partygate, the scandal that demonstrated, once and for all, that the governing elite were imposing restrictions they knew to be unnecessary. As Jon Dobinson points out: ‘When leaders make rules they have no intention of following themselves — and think they can get away with it — that’s one sign that democracy is dying. When there is no effective opposition to it, that’s another.’

‘Double standards are one of the key features of a corrupt, autocratic system. Obviously, those who make repressive rules don’t intend to abide by them. They wield power, they are not subject to it.’

I’ve been baffled by the lack of public anger at revelations, widely reported in the media, that the ruling class were repeatedly imposing life-blighting measures on tens of millions for reasons other than public health. There has no public debate about the wisdom of such measures and a widespread belief that they will never happen again sits oddly with casual comments from politicians indicating that they wouldn’t rule them out in future. Meanwhile, a raft of anti-democratic legislation is going through Parliament, enshrining measures which will limit freedom of speech and the right to protest on a permanent basis.

This anti-democratic shift is observable across the Western world, in the New World nations of Australia and Canada and in the formerly liberal countries of Europe, where the re-elected President Macron has tried to re-introduce vaccine passports for entry to France and Germany plans to reimpose mask mandates in the autumn.

Is this the end of the line for liberal democracy? Some observers of the political scene think it could be.

‘We’re threatened with the end of the liberal era,’ says Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute. ‘There’s a fundamental challenge to everything we believe about ourselves, and what kind of societies we want to live in.’ The threat, he adds, ‘doesn’t fit into any of the old categories of fascism or socialism: this is a different kind of technocratic dictatorship that’s a fundamental challenge to everything that we’d been taught to believe all our lives.’

If, we decide, post-pandemic, that we still believe in human rights, he adds, stressing the ‘if’’, we will need to ‘figure out ways to re-infuse the liberal experience with the natural dramas of life itself instead of creating ever-safer playgrounds.’

In mid-2022, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a crisis that extends way beyond a single public health emergency: a crisis of democracy.

What happened? Were democratic values never as fully rooted as I thought? Or did something fundamental change?

This is part 1 of a longer essay published on Substack. You can find the full essay here.