Democracy Against Itself: Sustaining an Unsustainable Idea 9780748681891

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Democracy Against Itself

DEMOCRACY AGAINST ITSELF SUSTAINING AN UNSUSTAINABLE IDEA

2 Mark Chou

© Mark Chou, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8188 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8189 1 (webready PDF) The right of Mark Chou to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Introduction vii 1. Democracy Against Itself

1

2. Democracy in Athens: Autonomy, Tragedy and Decline

24

3. Democide in Weimar: Militant Democracy and the Paradox of Self-Defence

50

4. The Coming Authoritarianism: The State of America’s Democracy 77 5. China’s New Authoritarianism: A Glimpse at Our PostDemocratic Future?

110

6. Occupy Democracy: Democracy Against Itself and the Global Occupy Movement

139

Bibliography 164 Index 178

Introduction

Democracies are not impervious to ruin. On 3 July 2013, barely one year after his inauguration as Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi was ousted in a bloodless and widely backed coup. Amid increasing claims of a creeping authoritarianism exhibited in his rule, worried citizens and opposition politicians openly called for Morsi’s resignation and then removal. Days following his first anniversary in office, the Egyptian military intervened. Spurred on by the popular support, and fearful that the country would be further destabilised by mass protests, General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi issued Morsi’s government with an ultimatum: either meet the democratic demands of the Egyptian people or the military will move to suspend the country’s constitution. Three days later, Morsi was forcibly removed from office. Adly Mansour, Egypt’s Chief Justice, was promptly named as the country’s interim president. But far from restoring order, as many believed this essentially ‘democratic’ coup would, Egypt descended further into chaos. The violence which the military had hoped to quell intensified. Lives were risked and lost. Casualties mounted. And democracy, even now, seems a faraway prospect. As Egypt’s political saga continues to play itself out, commentators have already begun asking what this latest episode says about the sustainability of democracy. Democrats who have long rejected the claim that democracies can be destroyed by their own citizens and political leaders are now having to think again as the Arab Spring gives way to Autumn rage. True, democracies are sprouting up globally in unexpected places. But that may mean little if what we are seeing in places like Egypt turns out to be a sign for what might happen elsewhere. Should this be the case then it may be time for those who support democracy to stop trumpeting on about how sustainable a practice democracy is. This book does just that. It argues that democratic failure is a prospect that remains very much entrenched both within the idea and ideal of democracy. Democratic self-destruction – or democracy vii

democracy against itself against itself – is a possible outcome of democratic politics. Ignoring this prospect does not make democracy more sustainable. If anything, the opposite is true. Now more than ever, as more and more countries become democratic, our attention needs to turn to how we sustain this essentially unsustainable idea. This being the premise, citing Joseph Goebbels may for once be oddly fitting. While no doubt gloating about what his government had managed to achieve, Goebbels stretched reality only just when he reminded the world that: ‘This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.’1 Forgetting for one moment his other big claim – ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it’ – and what we have are words to the effect that democracy is a precarious thing. Its precariousness, more to the point, emanates from within: from its own citizenry, their elected leaders and the institutions of popular rule. Democracy is the very thing, if we take Goebbels seriously, that can bring democracy to its knees. Or, as the Australian historian Robert Moss once said, ‘democracy can be destroyed through its own institutions’.2 This idea – that democracies can terminate themselves – speaks not only to democracy’s inherent corruptibility. It also, more worryingly, conjures up the image that democracy may be less sustainable than we have become accustomed to believe. As a system of governance that actively encourages those acting on its behalf and in its name to do as they please, democrats are liable, when fulfilling their civic duties, to blur the distinction between help and hindrance. Democrats can act against democracy just as they can act for d ­ emocracy – often because what they are doing is acting on their own behalf. In this regard, democracy is a lot like water, as Moss observed.3 While both entities can endure an assault to their core – democracy through opposition and water through heat – there comes a point when neither will be able to withstand the onslaught without lasting consequences. Indeed, just like water when boiled, Moss argues a democracy is made to tolerate criticism and alteration to its basic principles and processes without undermining the fact that it remains a democracy. To some extent, a democracy will be further refined when its citizens and their elected leaders question each other and challenge time-honoured principles – which is no different to water when boiled. But that only holds true to a point. Once boiled, water will eventually vaporise and transform into steam just as democracy, viii

introduction when pushed far enough by its own citizens, will eventually begin to unravel. Perhaps its undoing will only be temporary given that debate, dissent and emendation will likely not be silenced for long, even if formal opposition in the aftermath becomes more difficult to front under a system of governance less favourable to popular rule. But however temporary that suspension turns out to be, the point here is that democracies can suffer from debilitating crises of their own making. They can, by being democratic, self-destruct. Yet this analogy also holds true in another sense. Much like water that has been left to vaporise through the process of evaporation, democracy will suffer at the hands of its own constituents when debate and emendation to basic democratic principles are restrained during times of emergency. Repressed in this way, citizens become marginalised. They lose interest and faith in democracy. At both ends of this continuum then democracy faces a real threat: a threat that emanates from within – from its own citizens, from those they have elected to represent them and from the freedoms and institutions that together make democracy function. Democracy against itself may sound a highly abstract notion, something which should be considered unlikely to trouble modernday democracies in practice. But we know this is not so. In reality, the prospect that democracy might go off the rails, (mis-)guided by citizens with fickle desires and little political foresight, is not an altogether unreasonable idea. In fact, when re-articulated in less academic terms, what we are effectively dealing with is a set of practical questions that all democratic polities will at some stage be forced to confront. These questions, for example, ask us to think seriously about such matters as: In what ways can non- or anti-democratically inclined citizens employ legitimate democratic avenues to reject or fundamentally challenge democracy? How should pro-democratic citizens respond to cleavages bent on exceeding and replacing democracy in its current state with ‘a superior form of politics’ – especially when that politics is promoted in democracy’s name and for its own good?4 Can radical democratic projects, and not just avowedly antidemocratic projects, ever be antithetical, harmful to democracy? Is the state ever democratically justified to defend democracy against its enemies by suspending citizens’ rights and curtailing democratic freedoms? Or should a democratic state simply remain neutral, dutifully accepting the majority’s decision where that decision has been reached in a free and fair manner? In short, the overarching question which this book asks and tries to answer is whether a democracy can ix

democracy against itself ever elect – without the resort to widespread violence and intimidation, that is, without the resort to widespread anti-democratic ­measures – to end its own tenure in a legitimate, democratic way? In asking these questions, this book wants to remind readers of what has become a largely forgotten fact. Until quite recently, democracy has been thought of as taboo. Deemed by the greatest thinkers as an inherently flawed system of government, democracy was condemned as dangerous; bound to fall victim to its own lofty ideals and the excessive freedoms it afforded to citizens. This insight, as Roger Barrus, John Eastby, Joseph Lane, David Marion and James Pontuso write in their book, The Deconstitutionalization of America: The Forgotten Frailties of Democratic Rule, is now lost. Instead, the reverse has become truth: Dazzled by the successes of the United States and other democratic societies, modern democrats tend to look at the rise and eventual triumph of democracy as inevitable. This view is highly distorting, of both past and present politics. On more than one occasion in the past, the fate of democracy has hung in the balance; there was nothing inevitable about its success.5

The mature democracies of the United States, Western Europe and Australia are all ‘of a fairly recent vintage’, writes Jeffrey Isaac.6 It was not that long ago when democracies gave way to war and precipitated a totalitarian wave responsible for such atrocities as the Holocaust. In more recent times, democratic politics has too been held responsible for its own undoing, specifically in several notable ‘third wave’ democracies which suffered from a ‘reverse-wave’ of democratisation. With a byzantine bureaucratic labyrinth, famous for producing governmental gridlock and a disgruntled or apathetic citizenry, it is possible to see how populist appeals on both the Left and Right can gain traction in a democratic milieu and begin to look appealing. When this happens, citizens can be at the forefront of a movement which, disguised in democratic garb, seeks the destruction of democracy. Democrats thus need to realise that what makes democracies ‘democratic’ – their openness, toleration and pluralism – can also make them susceptible to being challenged, undone and destroyed. That this is possible is because, at its core, democracy is uniquely political. Premised on the ‘public evaluation’ of its basic tenets and central principles, democracy is rule by opinion, contest and dissent.7 In such an environment, no so-called ‘unpolitical good’ is exempt x

introduction from questioning which, in theory at least, is another way of saying that all things are political. Democracy is no different to ‘an impetuous river that incessantly overflows its bed’.8 It is ‘a practice largely in search of itself, struggling beyond pasts and presents in which it was unrealized (both for many people and across many domains of life) and in the face of futures threatening to retrench its achievements and aspirations.’9 This makes democracy a potential danger given that it may just as easily induce less democracy as greater democratisation. There is no safe path that democrats can tread that is not at the same time pockmarked with potential pitfalls. All democracies are ‘balancing’ acts.10 At one end, demagogues and extremists are free to vie for the popular vote. At the other end, elected leaders and the state struggle to retain the established constitutional order. Though in most cases constitutional safeguards make it extremely difficult to move too far in either direction, circumstances have transpired and enabled democrats to generate the needed momentum to ­unsettle existing political conventions. Popular votes and constitutional referendums have been cast to halt democratic politics. Governments have suspended the very freedoms and rights which enabled democracy to flourish in the first place. Taking the notion of democracy against itself seriously, this book tells the story of democracy’s end in a novel manner: one which blends theory and example to demonstrate how democracy can sow the seeds of its own destruction simply by being democratic. Drawing on selected readings of the decline of democracy in ancient Athens and the Weimar Republic, two controversial but classic cases where democrats acted against their democracy, the book will then offer its diagnoses on how two distinct contemporary democracies – those in the United States and China – may follow this trajectory of decline and self-destruction. Finally, the book will end by examining the threats that attend the growing initiatives to globalise democracy through the recent Occupy Movement. From these cases, the book will extrapolate the key conditions and characteristics of democracy that make it prone to self-destruct, offering insights along the way into how democracies can, in the course of being democratic, jeopardise their own existence.

Notes  1. See Gregory H. Fox and Georg Nolte, ‘Intolerant Democracies’, Harvard International Law Journal (vol. 36, no. 1, 1995), 1; Samuel xi

democracy against itself Issacharoff, ‘Fragile Democracies’, Harvard Law Review (vol. 120, no. 6, 2007), 1408.   2. Robert Moss, The Collapse of Democracy (London: Abacus, 1977), 12, emphasis original.   3. Ibid., 35.   4. Tony Fry, Design as Politics (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011), 5.   5. Roger M. Barrus, John H. Eastby, Joseph H. Lane Jr, David E. Marion and James F. Pontuso, The Deconstitutionalization of America: The Forgotten Frailties of Democratic Rule (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), 5.  6. Jeffrey C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 22.  7. Nadia Urbinati, ‘Unpolitical Democracy’, Political Theory (vol. 38, no. 1, 2010), 65.   8. Miguel Abensour, “‘Savage democracy” and “principle of anarchy”’, Philosophy and Social Criticism (vol. 28, no. 6, 2002), 708.   9. Romand Coles, Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xi. 10. John L. Safford, Democracy is Dangerous: Resisting the Tyranny of the Majority (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002), viii, 156.

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1

Democracy Against Itself

Books on why and how democracies collapse are now as commonplace as those which promote and consolidate democracy. In other words, studies on the death of democracy have become as politically important as those which concentrate on its formation. So what sets this book apart from all the others which have examined the breakdown of democracy? In a word, it is the focus on the endogenous causes of democratic failure. Said to encompass those circumstances where democratic citizens and processes are ultimately held responsible for the demise of democracy, endogenous breakdown can be considered an umbrella category of sorts. The aim of this book is to develop and explore one particular type of endogenous breakdown: democracy against itself. A largely under-theorised concept, democracy against itself can essentially be defined as the capacity that democrats have to destroy democracy in the course of fulfilling their democratic duties. It arises when democratic citizens, their elected leaders, the institutions and procedures of popular participation, and the very freedoms and pluralisms which make mass rule possible, use democratic means to act against democracy. Unlike violent rebellions and fascist uprisings, democracy against itself is distinct because it emanates ‘from within the government’ itself and comprises acts such as ‘suspending the constitution, arresting the opposition politicians, restricting the activities of the mass media, or rigging electoral results’.1 In this way, where acts to curtail democracy are supported by a majority of citizens or their elected leaders is where we will have a case of democracy against itself. Of course, this is a rather simplified account of how democracy against itself manifests. In practice, few who have acted against democracy have been able to do so without resort to at least some non- or anti-democratic measures. In this regard, not only is the end they seek to realise against democracy so to speak, but so are the means they employ. Not only that, but it is never democracy alone that is solely responsible for its own demise. Contextual or ­exogenous 1

democracy against itself factors are always important and, even where their influence seems absent, they are always present. These are inescapable realities which should not be swept under the conceptual rug in an effort to produce seamless theory. But even with this in mind, this book will still define democracy against itself as situations where democrats resorted primarily to democratic means to produce ends harmful to democracy’s tenure. Where a democracy has been undone due, in some important way, to democratic reasons is what this book will seek to expose in the coming chapters. In this chapter, though, the objective is to do two things by way of setting the scene. First, the chapter sets out the distinction, commonly made in the field of democratisation studies, between exogenous and endogenous breakdowns of democracy. This step is taken in order to outline the area in which this study is situated. Having done this, the chapter then defines the concept of democracy against itself. To do this, the chapter provides a theoretical overview of the key studies which scholars have undertaken into this area in order to draw together a cohesive conception of how democracies can, in the course of being democratic, sow the seeds of their own destruction.

Democratic Breakdowns: The Exogenous/Endogenous Distinction For the most part, studies which have examined the ‘manner by which democracies are terminated’ have favoured so-called exogenous explanations.2 ‘Breakdowns are exogenous’, as Ko Maeda points out, ‘where a democratic government is terminated by forces outside of the government, typically the military.’3 The example he cites of this is the infamous 1973 coup d’état in Chile which saw General Augusto Pinochet take control of the country’s democratic institutions and oust its civilian government with military might. This democracy was brought to an end not by its own citizens and leaders, and not by the resort to democratic institutions and processes. Rather, it was destroyed by an external, non-democratic initiative which suspended the country’s democratic constitution through the use of force. But coups d’état are, of course, only one example – and an extreme one at that – of how exogenous breakdowns can materialise. Other, less violent, determinants can also be rightly classified as exogenous. Writing in Determinants of Democratization, Jan Teorell has identified such factors as the level of a population’s education, how industrialised the society is, whether established media 2

democracy against itself assemblages are in place, the stage of economic development, and the more general regional and international trends taking place at the time as key exogenous determinants of whether a democracy will ‘slide back toward authoritarianism’.4 For him, there are two conclusions to draw looking at regime changes between the years 1972 and 2006.5 First, there is no single variable or determinant which, on its own, can cause a democracy to fall. This implies that, in the second instance, democracy is neither ‘fragile nor feeble’ but, in Teorell’s words, ‘a highly resilient regime type’. Ethan Kapstein and Nathan Converse agree.6 As they make plain, democracies generally only fail because a number of intervening factors have colluded to bring about a regime’s end. Here, the factors most often implicated in democratic failure include a country’s wealth, its level of ethnic fragmentation, its per capita income, and the general health of its economy. These are the factors that most affect a democracy’s chances of surviving from infancy into maturity. As such, these are the factors most commonly to blame when a democracy is said to have suffered from an exogenous termination. An important point to note here is that many studies that ascribe democratic breakdowns to exogenous factors fall, explicitly or otherwise, within the gamut of the democratic consolidation literature. United by its effort to enhance democracy from exogenous corrosives, democratic consolidation has as its objective to revive weak, failing and failed democracies. The literature produced by these scholars and policy-makers, in their attempt to address how democracy can be promoted and reformed to defend itself against destructive influences, has been both vast and highly sophisticated. Yet as diverse as this scholarship is, there are perhaps two critical tenets that run through this body of work. The first is the tendency to point the finger at extrinsic rather than at intrinsic factors triggering the collapse of democracy. And the second is the inclination to see democratic failure almost synonymous with so-called weak democracies or as a corollary of the early stages of the transition towards democracy. The assumption behind these dual tenets is that democracies, especially mature or strong democracies, fail only on the rarest occasions. Not only that, but these failures, when they do occur, typically stem from circumstances or factors beyond the strict purview of democracy – that is to say, factors exogenous to democracy. Civil strife, economic recession, all-out war, and sometimes even largescale natural and human-made catastrophes, for example, are the 3

democracy against itself frequently cited influences by scholars of this stripe.7 During all other times, democracies are built to succeed. They become stronger as their years get longer; they do not seize and collapse when at their supposed peak. An instructive example of this thinking can be seen in the question asked, and the answer provided, by noted consolidation scholars Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub and Antonio Limongi in their essay, ‘What Makes Democracies Endure?’ In response to the important question ‘[i]f a country, any randomly selected country, is to have a democratic regime next year, what conditions should be present in that country and around the world this year?’, they respond with the answer: ‘democracy, affluence, growth with moderate inflation, declining inequality, a favorable international climate, and parliamentary institutions’.8 This may seem obvious and uncontroversial at one level. Yet at another level it shows that determinants affecting whether a democracy is likely to succeed or fail depend more on exogenous factors; indeed, democracy and parliamentary institutions are only two of the six key determinants with respect to democratic consolidation. To be fair, though, there are consolidation scholars like Guillermo O’Donnell who remain convinced by democratic consolidation despite being critical of the teleological narratives that typically accompany consolidation. Against the prevailing wisdom, O’Donnell has made the case that democratic consolidation need not be teleological or ethnocentric in nature. His point was that it may ultimately be illusory for democrats to think that all forms of democratic consolidation will inevitably ‘come to resemble the sort of democracy found in admired countries in the Northwest – admired for their long-enduring regimes and for their wealth’.9 Though there is value in at least believing that democracy and progress are somehow linked, past and present examples prove otherwise. This is why O’Donnell’s analysis is noteworthy: it goes against the accepted view which, among most scholars of democratic consolidation, tends to distinguish democratic breakdowns from the workings of ‘normal’ democratic politics. Failures of democratic politics are seen as an anomaly whose true source can be said to stem from some external force or factor. There are obvious benefits to approaching democratic breakdown this way. The main one is that it allows scholars and policy-makers to think that they can, in Alfred Stepan’s words, ‘diagnose the origins of the problem’ and, more importantly, ‘attempt to evaluate possible prescriptions’.10 Because democratic 4

democracy against itself breakdown is abnormal, and extrinsic to the idea of democracy, it means that when a democracy does actually break down there should be reasons which can be identified and rectified. As this happens, democracy’s institutional, socio-economic and political glitches can be minimised, if not eliminated. Freed from extrinsic binds, democratisation should therefore progress unimpeded. Though the rationale behind these proposals has been simplified here for the purposes of argumentation, it is still right to say that their objective is to guard democracies against so-called reversewaves of democratisation. What matters most for these scholars is that supporters of democracy stay ‘pre-occupied with keeping democracy alive’.11 Democracies do not fail in and of themselves is their predominant motto. Given this, the task must be to isolate and mitigate these extrinsic factors before they have the opportunity to infect and corrode democratic institutions and cultures. It is hard to deny that the exogenous paradigm and democratic consolidation make for anything other than perfect bedfellows. For those who have ideological, political and even financial interests in seeing democracy succeed, exogenous determinants do not so much condemn democracy to failure but point to its inherent perfectibility. Consolidation via the exogenous route implicitly acknowledges that democracy can be sustained if the most damaging external influences are excised from the core of democracy. By apportioning the blame onto exogenous institutional, socio-economic and political factors, exogenous explanations thus offer democrats a way to diagnose the problem of democratic collapse without needing to problematise the core tenets of democracy itself. Unfortunately, as Maeda points out, the academic appeal of the exogenous paradigm has not always been backed by empirical evidence. Citing the results of his own survey of democratic terminations in the period from 1950 to 2004, he notes that around 40 per cent of all such terminations were due to endogenous reasons.12 These terminations, as opposed to their exogenous counterpart, emanate primarily from ‘within the government’. Specifically, as he notes, it results from democratic leaders who end democracy’s tenure through measures that suspend crucial democratic rights and freedoms or disrupt the key political processes and institutions of democracy. Though Maeda’s definition of what amounts to endogenous termination is fairly narrow – a popularly elected leader who terminates democracy to remain the country’s sole unchallenged leader – we can extrapolate from this notion several critical points about the nature 5

democracy against itself of democracy and how it might unravel due to its own devices. In the first instance, Maeda’s conception of endogenous termination really highlights what can occur in a democracy and through democracy’s institutions. His focus may be purely on the activities of the democratic leader, but the same freedoms afforded to the leader are, in different ways, also afforded to a range of other democratic actors too. Ethnic groups, religious movements, dissident associations and even run-of-the-mill political parties can unite disaffected citizens behind them to bestow themselves with increased if not authoritarian powers. ‘When these situations arise’, as Barrus et al. write, ‘they are typically dismissed as temporary setbacks along the path to democracy.’13 Endogenous determinants of democratic breakdown tell us that this is not necessarily so, especially when what amounts to endogenous terminations are construed broadly. Indeed, as Barrus et al. continue, that this is possible demonstrates to us ‘that such situations, which are eerily reminiscent of the political conditions in post-Periclean Athens, represent dangerous tendencies inherent in democracy itself’.14 The important thing to emphasise is that democracy is just as likely to be undone ‘by too much democracy as by too little’.15 This prognosis has several implications with respect to endogenous terminations. The first is that democracies seem to have an almost uncanny capacity ‘to empower the masses without regard for the quality of the political decisions that will result’.16 The upshot, argues David Estlund, is that ‘[c]oncern for the quality of decisions can seem to lead in an antidemocratic direction’.17 This is what makes the endogenous paradigm so intriguing: democracy invites both the masses to do as they will and the expert representative concerned with what may result to do as they must in reply. Both act in the name of democracy and, by doing so, both potentially act to undermine it. That this is possible without breaching democratic conventions means that the processes of democratisation are capable of triggering a reversal of democracy. This is the second implication of endogenous terminations: that many of the core freedoms and rights that characterise the democratic condition can be used and abused to invert democracy against itself. At least in the case of the Second Wave democracies that collapsed in Western Europe, it was the flexible, open and fluid nature of these democratic iterations that, in Zevedei Barbu’s words, ‘led directly or indirectly to the creation of a totalitarian way of life’.18 While some citizens thrived in the 6

democracy against itself knowledge that they were now the masters of their own destiny, that nothing about their future was predetermined, others struggled with the sense of uncertainty. Anxiety and fear ensued and many willingly turned to movements which arose in the democratic milieu to reassure the masses and, more importantly, to take power back from them. ‘Fascism and Communism’, for Barbu, ‘are two of the most characteristic aspects of this type of adjustment.’19 Today, in contemporary democracies like the United States, this type of populist democratic politics is also at play. It threatens to undercut democracy, slowly eroding the values and mechanisms that have for decades supported open debate, the freedom of speech, the separation of powers, a robust opposition, and free and fair elections.20 All of this is occurring within modern-day democracies and in compliance with democratic procedures. When construed in this way, endogenous terminations effectively imply that democracy is no different to totalitarianism, authoritarianism, communism, or any other form of government for that matter. All have ‘intrinsic and characteristic deficiencies’.21 This point may seem obvious, and it has been pointed out variously throughout democracy’s history. But in recent times, when a particular version of democracy became politically triumphant following the end of the Cold War, criticisms about democracy have rarely been directed at its essence. Only those who identify themselves as democracy’s enemies have had anything cogent to say about democracy’s inherent flaws. This book rescues this critique, but on behalf of democracy’s supporters and in support of democracy.

Democracy Against Itself It will do this by outlining the notion of democracy against itself. While there is no cohesive literature on this topic, and no agreedupon nomenclature, scholars from politics, philosophy, social theory and law have all grappled with how democracies can, under certain circumstances, self-destruct. Accordingly, before we can understand what democracy against itself really entails, we should first come to grips with some of the ways scholars have conceptualised this specific stripe of endogenous democratic failure to date. A fitting place to begin this investigation is with the broad acknowledgement that, due to democracy’s nature, acts of self-defence can be difficult to discern from acts of self-harm. Ruled by majorities prone to being swept up by popular sentiment, democracies can just 7

democracy against itself as easily tolerate wrong decisions as the right ones. Democracies, premised as they are on notions of pluralism and dissent, can even tolerate the emergence of a majority that is united by a democratic hatred robust enough to slowly unravel democracy itself. This is why, according to Dick Howard, totalitarianism and democracy can make for strange but fitting bedfellows.22 The one is not beyond the other. Just as the seeds of democracy are frequently sown in the rocky soil of totalitarianism, totalitarian urges can find nourishment and legitimacy within democracy’s gates. As Howard continues, for citizens unsatisfied with democracy, they need look no further than their fellow democratic citizens to find ‘some domestic support from those who despair of democracy, or at least of this democracy, and who convince themselves that a better, more substantial or less superficial, democracy can be brought into being’.23 Whether acting on democracy’s behalf or not, movements can emerge, the result of which can be detrimental to democracy. But what is it about democracy that makes such reversals democratically possible? To what sources can we turn for some illumination on this phenomenon? These questions can be answered variously depending, first, on to whom we turn for guidance and, second, on the type of democracy being analysed. We can take Plato’s critique of Athenian democracy and Alexis de Tocqueville’s treatise on democracy in America as two early illustrations of this. While not wanting to get too bogged down in Platonic philosophy for present purposes, we cannot talk about democracy’s inherent flaws without at least giving a passing mention to Plato’s early criticisms of participatory democracy. As a thinker who lived in Athens during one of its greatest periods of decline, Plato’s disdain for democracy was, in one regard, as much about democracy as it was about the state of Athenian society more generally. Athens, according to Plato, had by that time surrendered all its claims to moral superiority and was, instead, mired down in an incapacitating war against its political adversary, Sparta. Led by uneducated and poor citizens, Plato observed that the masses were effectively free to do as they pleased. There was no regard for right or wisdom, only opinion. Indeed, respect for the law and for timehonoured institutions like the family and schools had become a joke for all but a small minority of Athens’ citizens. ‘This situation’, as Georg Sorensen notes in his commentary of Plato, ‘would lead to anarchy (the absence of political authority) and chaos, paving the way for tyranny (rule by a single dictator)’.24 8

democracy against itself Democracy factored into this predicament to the extent that it was democracy, in Plato’s reasoning, that empowered the masses. It was democracy that gave them limitless kratia or power. But without wisdom and education, something which democracy could not guarantee, power could be easily abused. The democratic majority could legitimately take society hostage or have itself taken hostage by demagogues preying on mass anxieties.25 As equality gives way to disorderliness and self-interest, power is then transferred from the masses to the despot. ‘That is why, for Plato, the trajectory that begins with the delights of democracy ends with the nightmare of tyranny’, in Alain Badiou’s account.26 For Plato, in brief, there is something about the business of democracy that means it will eventually ‘promise itself out of business’.27 Writing some two millennia later, another source that can illuminate the notion of democracy against itself for us is Tocqueville’s reflections on democracy in America, specifically on how democratic politics can descend into something that is akin to the tyranny of the majority. While certainly true that the majority’s ‘right and ability to do everything’ in a democracy is conducive to freedom, it is also true that with freedom come potential dangers. And for Tocqueville, what is most dangerous about freedom is that it constitutes an utter ‘lack of a guarantee against tyranny’ by the majority itself.28 In these situations, there is comfort in the fact that majorities do change in a democracy, and quite abruptly at times. But at all other times, as Tocqueville continues, there can be periods when ‘outside the majority there is nothing that resists it’.29 In other words, if ever a majority elects to abandon democratic principles and procedures by radically altering or suspending constitutional provisions, it will have been due in large part to the powers that majorities wield in democracy. For this reason, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America reads as something of a cautionary tale. Its message is that ‘[i]f ever freedom is lost in America [or in any other democracy for that matter], one will have to blame the omnipotence of the majority that will have brought minorities to despair and have forced them to make an appeal to material force’.30 Whether the actual cessation of democracy is a brief and imperceptible affair or becomes, to the contrary, something that is both permanent and inescapable, the point remains the same: democracies can, by being democratic, sow the seeds of their own destruction. Though time and place separates them, Plato and Tocqueville can be read together in this instance for several reasons. The first is that, 9

democracy against itself as a result of their observations about democracy, both theorists altered how subsequent generations would approach and engage with democracy. In effect, Plato’s ideas could be said to have laid the philosophical blueprint that triggered democracy’s demise, while Tocqueville’s depiction of democracy in America forewarned countless about both the potential and pitfalls of democratic governance. This leads to a second reason for reading the two scholars together: despite analysing very different democratic configurations – one an example of participatory democracy and the other a model of representative democracy – both identified something about the tyrannical nature inherent to democratic majorities. For Plato, what was so wrong about democracy was that it was premised on the participation of citizens (read: the uneducated masses). What the majority of these citizens decided became law. When the majority decided right, the democracy benefited. When they decided wrong, the democracy suffered. The fate of the city fell to these decisions and, democratically speaking, there was nothing that prevented a majority from deciding wrongly for the wrong reasons. In other words, there was nothing stopping a majority of citizens deciding to follow after despotic leaders bent on restructuring democratic society. This was a prospect that Tocqueville picked up on also. According to the French thinker, the democratic majority was both a guarantee against antidemocratic tendencies and a potential for it. Majorities, in this sense, are king under democracy. This is as heartening as it is treacherous. The potential problems this throws up are numerous and they have been well-documented by theorists of democracy ever since. But what has been less systematically analysed has been the internal mechanisms of democracy that allow for such problems to arise. The thorny matter of the tyranny of the majority may be well-known, in other words. However, what else can democracy throw at its own face? How does it do so? What names have scholars given to this phenomenon and what reasons have they come up with to explain it? Taking his cue from Plato, the first contemporary thinker worthy of a mention in this regard is the Australian political theorist John Keane, whose concept of democide captures well the spectrum of issues examined here. Noting that much of what ails democracy can be traced back to its ‘congenital incompetence’, or ‘a slow-wittedness that stems ultimately from its dependence upon the ignorance of a fickle people’, Keane echoes Plato’s sentiments that democracy can be no different ‘to a shop of fools sailing into treacherous unknown waters, without a captain or navigational equipment for plotting its 10

democracy against itself position’.31 This, of course, is democracy’s greatest and best attribute. Yet for Keane as for Plato, that democracies can unwittingly sail into treacherous waters is precisely the worry. Lacking a wise leader or any set direction, democracies are thus prone to go in the wrong direction without anyone so much as realising it – that is, until too late. Writing in his recent opus The Life and Death of Democracy, Keane defines this prospect under the heading of democide: the innate capacity that democracy has to commit an act of suicide. Specifically, as Keane points out, The vexing thought that democracy as we now know it in all its geographic and historical variations might not survive indefinitely, that it could slit its own throat or quietly take its own life in an act of ‘democide’ . . . runs counter, of course, to much recent optimism about the global triumph of democracy.32

Though he does account for a number of other, exogenous factors triggering democratic collapse, what makes Keane’s contribution noteworthy is how blatantly he attributes democracy itself as one of the key determining factors for the death of democracy. Democracies can commit suicide is the important point to take away from this. Moreover, it can do all of this as part of its normal operation. No democratic principles need be contravened in the process (even though they frequently are). This point – for so long the preserve of anti-democratic thought – should be taken more seriously by democrats, writing in support of democracy. And it has. Keane’s is only one of several recent attempts to theorise the democidal nature of democracy from a democratic point of view. Though each calls the phenomenon by a different name, the process whereby a democracy can be dissolved by its own citizens and leaders is certainly not as atypical as it may seem. Many have attempted to come to grips with how proposals to advance or defend democracy can inadvertently unleash a wave of dissent or repression that will lead to its own undoing. For instance, responding to the question of how democracies should defend themselves against anti-democratic groups that rise to power through more or less legitimate avenues, Alexander Kirshner raises for us the thorny matter of popular threats and their ability to threaten democracy without breaching procedural conventions. Said to encompass those situations where a ‘group credibly intends to use democratic procedures to win power, stymie democratic institutions, and undermine democracy itself’, popular threats are effectively a 11

democracy against itself practical corollary of the political freedoms afforded to all individuals and factions under democracy.33 Understood this way, it becomes possible to see such threats to democracy not solely as the ruin of democracy but as what can be unleashed when a democracy operates, paradoxically, at its optimum. In other words, a democracy that is open enough to sustain anti-democratic factions within its midst is a democracy that is also brave enough to subject itself to those whose ideals are fundamentally at odds with democracy. Two implications about democracy follow from Kirshner’s argument about popular threats. The first is that in a democracy questions can be legitimately raised not only about the nature of the democracy but also about its very foundations. There is nothing that cannot, at least in principle, be interrogated and revoked when backed by a sufficient number of citizens. And because democratic principles and processes are to a lesser or greater degree premised on the participation of a representative body of citizens on all matters related to that society, a diverse range of perspectives and proposals can emerge. Though these are most frequently related to micro-issues – for example, the most expedient and economic ways to redress problems to do with the environment, refugees and resources – c­ itizens within a democracy can also potentially raise deeper questions that go to the heart of how they live as a community. They can, if they or the circumstances so demand, frustrate and even fight the foundational norms that have sustained their society as a whole. A democracy, in this sense, can open itself up to a variety of dissenting views. The fact that ‘[a]ll democratic regimes include members who prefer other forms of government’ means that, for Kirshner, it is not inconceivable that on those rare occasions some individuals and groups ‘who oppose democracy may stymie representative institutions or disenfranchise minorities’.34 And so, the second point to take away from Kirshner’s argument is this: none of this should in theory be prohibited where those who oppose democracy do so by respecting set democratic procedures. This is how a popular threat to democracy can become a credible one. In short, enfranchising the people necessarily means giving a political voice to all viewpoints, including those that disdain democratic configurations. It is when these viewpoints manage to adhere to democratic processes – that is, by being democratic – that a democracy permits itself to be defeated from within. Of course, specific mechanisms are commonly built into modern democracies with precisely the aim of preventing them from being 12

democracy against itself illegitimately taken hostage by a small minority of their own leaders or citizens. But what Kirshner is talking about – and what this book is attempting to get at – are those situations where a sufficient chorus of citizens and their leaders legitimately and fairly deploy democratic principles and procedures to voice their displeasure at democracy and, where they can, to end its tenure. What makes these occasions all the more remarkable, and for that matter harder to discern, is that until such time when the democracy is actually toppled or infringed, these popular threats can and sometimes do actually contribute to the fervour of democratic engagement. Mass dissent during public debates and at the ballot box can enliven democracies and give the sense that there is something more at stake. Particularly when dissent takes place without the resort to widespread violence and coercion – after all, no democracy can claim to be without such elements from time to time – no one can dispute that these are the moments that democracy was made to incite and endure. In setting out to define democide this way, we cannot get away without at least briefly mentioning the idea of proceduralism and its presence in popular threats. This is a complex idea and one to which this chapter cannot do justice. All it can say is that the prospect of popular threats can in part be seen as a prospect of proceduralism. At its simplest, this idea holds that the procedures of a democracy, and how faithfully they have been applied, fundamentally determine whether a democracy and the decisions made can be deemed as legitimately democratic.35 Where the institutional requirements of a fair and free debate, press and election have been met, and where citizens have not been unduly prevented from or pressured into participation, the theory states that the resultant majority decision must be given the full weight of law – even if that decision turns out to be patently at odds with the principles and processes of democracy. This being the case, the test for democratic legitimacy is independent of the actual content or substance of the democratic decision that is eventually made. Of course, proceduralism is very much tainted with an intrinsic assumption, an optimism even, traceable to the Enlightenment belief that human independence will always lead to political progress. In this view of things, human beings should be given the freedom to choose their own paths in life. What is more, the choices they make should be denied by no man or woman, particularly when they have been guided by rational thought. But the assumption that underpins this thinking, flawed or not, holds that few would under these 13

democracy against itself c­ onditions freely opt to return themselves to the enslavement enacted upon them in former times by authoritarian and totalitarian masters. Sadly, with the benefit of political hindsight on our side, this assumption has largely remained just that. There are no guarantees that guard against the human tenacity to choose as we will. Because of this, ‘[t]he end of democracy’ will, as Kirshner acknowledges, always play ‘an important, if underappreciated role in procedural theory’.36 Railing against the dangers of a purely procedural understanding of democracy, Samuel Issacharoff notes that democracies can opt for a more substantive conception of democratic politics to guard against the ‘threat of being compromised from within’.37 In much the same way that Germany now categorically excludes Neo-Nazi parties from democratic arenas and denies them crucial democratic freedoms and rights, democracies should be allowed to legitimately weed out anti-democratic factions intent on using democracy’s openness against itself. That this is necessary is because, as Issacharoff writes, the procedural aspects of democracy – namely, its institutions, procedures and electoral politics – ‘are a powerful situs for the mobilization of political forces’.38 The procedures, in this sense, can ‘provide a natural medium for partisans to have their passions raised and to provoke frenzied mob activity’. Regard for procedure without an equal regard for substance is therefore counterproductive given that, once empowered, anti-democratic parties ‘can use their positions in parliament to cripple any prospect of effective governance, destabilize the state, and launch themselves as successors to a failing democracy’. But for Issacharoff, this is how so-called intolerant democracies emerge. By using democratic mechanisms to repel anti-democratic forces, these democratic polities can begin to display a categorical illiberal prejudice against certain people and issues. But all of this is justified, as the advocates of intolerant democracy like to point out, because without such measures a democracy would risk being destroyed from within. Indeed, having regard for democratic substance means that states and governments need to deny particular populations and cleavages the procedural rights enjoyed by other democrats from time to time. Extremists of all varieties, whether they hail from the political Left or Right, should be prohibited from playing democrats. This means preventing such individuals and groups from participating in the electoral arena and using free speech and media to spread their gospel word of destruction. Yet the irony of a democracy that categorically designates ‘that 14

democracy against itself certain viewpoints may not find expression in the political arena and may never be considered as contenders for popular support’, in Issacharoff’s words, is that it too veers dangerously close to threatening the destruction of democracy.39 There is nothing wrong with democracies defending themselves by instituting measures that temporarily or permanently suspend certain fundamental democratic rights and freedoms. So protected, democracy’s core principles are given a better chance of survival even if the citizens are in the meantime denied certain democratic promises. But while this may indeed ward off the initial threat described above, Issacharoff concedes that by doing so democracy will have potentially dealt itself another deadly blow. ‘The threat is real’ is his key point.40 And it is coming ‘from both directions’: first, from extremists who weasel their way to democracy’s helm and, second, from governments and citizens who ‘shut down’ democracy in an effort to stave off the popular threat. When democratic politics veers too far in either direction, as it can be prone to do under certain circumstances, democracy becomes inherently fragile. Writing in his article on ‘Democratic Politics and Anti-democratic Politics’, David Plotke takes up the dual nature of this democratic threat, showing how efforts to strengthen and sustain democracy can be nothing short of a tightrope act. Tilt too far either way and democracy risks hurtling over the brink. The essential question Plotke seeks answers to is: ‘How should democratic polities and pro-democratic citizens respond with respect to citizens who act politically to reject democratic ideas and practices?’41 It is a simple yet pertinent question in the light of 9/11, he suggests, when political organisations in Western liberal democracies appeared all of a sudden from the woodwork to challenge fundamental democratic ideals. In setting out his answer, Plotke notes that a democracy can go down either the path of toleration or of repression – avenues embedded throughout Issacharoff’s analysis – the sum of which would likely amount to an act of democide. Tolerate anti-democratic forces too much and it is likely they will gradually increase their support base and political power. Repress them and the risk is that the democracy suffers as a whole; democratic means are jettisoned in order to procure supposedly democratic ends. Given this, Plotke contends the best solution to the tricky issue of anti-democratic politics in democratic polities is incorporation. What distinguishes incorporation from toleration is that the former constitutes an attempt to not merely passively accept anti-democratic 15

democracy against itself forces but to contest their rise. In this sense, incorporation would seem the most democratic course given it is premised on ‘an extended political process, not something achieved via declaration’.42 How effective it will be in practice depends on whether there is a sufficient majority of citizens willing to contest their anti-democratic counterparts and to incorporate them into democratic society. Moreover, the strategy is premised on the belief that subjecting democratic society to new ideas, even those critical of its foundations, is something that is both necessary and potentially enriching for democracy.43 Specifically, incorporation is an initiative containing three critical phases. The first and most important phase is establishing a mutual understanding between democrats and anti-democrats, requiring both sides to play by the rules, that is, to subject their ideas and proposals to democratic debate and democratic processes. This is done primarily to identify anti-democratic actors willing to at least act democratically from those who are not. The second phase of incorporation requires both sides to engage in an open and frank negotiation about their respective claims and proposals. What is wrong with democracy? Why should it be replaced? And what should take its place? These questions will likely trigger intense divisions and conflicts among the protagonists but, hopefully, an element of ­compromise as well. By supporting incorporation, Plotke obviously focuses his comments on the positive aspects of this strategy. As he argues, democracy’s success, while not assured, is likely. ‘A strategy of incorporation can bring significant parts of these anti-democratic forces into democratic politics while anticipating that their opposition to democracy will decline over time.’44 And so, while sections of the anti-­democratic community will probably always reject consensus – by refusing to participate in democratic practices or splintering off to found more militaristic and extremist enclaves – the majority is expected to slowly embrace the democratic ideal. But the optimistic nature of Plotke’s argument is also what makes it problematic. Certainly one can hope that incorporation, as its name suggests, will lead to the greater integration of anti-democrats into democratic society. It is certainly possible that anti-democratic proposals will be defeated if large enough a population arises to contest and convince the people that the democratic path is the better one. But this all rests on the willingness of the citizens: if they are convinced that democracy is more adept at securing their future, then they will side with democracy. If not, they will side with proposals 16

democracy against itself that may well have anti-democratic goals in mind. Furthermore, just as the process of incorporation can convince some anti-democrats to swap sides, while anticipating those who remain to eventually dwindle, the reverse possibility can also occur. Swayed by the antidemocratic appeal, democrats may begin to see the error of their ways and opt to reject democracy. This may seem inconceivable for those who support democracy. However, in situations when the veracity of anti-democratic forces is such that they require incorporation, it would suggest the presence of a political volatility robust enough to turn things on their head. As such, the very appeal of ­incorporation – the open contestation between the antagonists with a view towards reaching consensus – is its very weakness in that it is just as likely to lead to the incorporation of democrats into anti-democratic movements. This being so, the prospect of democide is not so much diminished as entrenched within democratic incorporation. At the base of these differing articulations of democide, the point that appears reiterated time and again is that democracy is a fundamentally indeterminate idea and institution. Dissidents can still claim to have done no wrong even after unleashing popular forces capable of crippling democratic processes. Democratically elected leaders can inadvertently harm the vitality of their democracy as a result of their efforts to stamp out revolt. In principle, both are democratic acts. And yet, both have the potential to do harm. This is why democracy is a regime without set boundaries, or at the very least without known boundaries. The consequence is that there is no foundational law which, in theory, is beyond question and repudiation. In the words of Claude Lefort, ‘the important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge.’45 To some extent, it is democracy’s fate to overturn past principles, especially those instituted through democratic processes. For the political theorist Nadia Urbinati, this is one of the primary reasons why democracy is preferable to other forms of government. It is a very simple if neglected fact, she argues, that democracy ‘is the only imperfect government that allows its citizens to acknowledge its imperfections openly and publicly’.46 Because no government is perfect, democracy being no exception, it follows that no foundational law should trump the one which holds that government must have its imperfections openly and publicly acknowledged. Democracy is, or at least should be, a ‘permanent process of ­emendation’ is 17

democracy against itself Urbinati’s point. It must never become foreclosed to the possibility of there being foreign perspectives and new options. Even where there is an excess of ideas, actors and actions – to the point where disorder threatens to undo entrenched political conventions – a democracy will have fulfilled its purpose if it enables otherwise marginalised individuals to debate and influence the key political issues of the day.47 In its tussle to balance the push for greater openness and the need for some form of political certainty, Alan Keenen thus notes that it is characteristic of democracy to make its citizens ‘risk, or even violate, some democratic principles in order to respect others’.48 When this occurs, democratic processes give to the people an almost unlimited right to do as they will. Whether they then choose to abandon the policies and laws they themselves instituted in the past, along with the system of governance which empowered them to do so in the process, is left completely up to them. This, to cite Lefort again, is how democracy can germinate into something that best resembles totalitarianism. Specifically, he puts it this way: There is always a possibility that the logic of democracy will be disrupted in a society in which the foundations of the political order and the social order vanish, in which that which has been established never bears the seal of full legitimacy, in which differences of rank no longer go unchallenged, in which right proves to depend upon the discourse which articulates it, and in which the exercise of power depends upon conflict.49

The twisted logic is that when questioning and indeterminacy are taken to their absolute, only some external, foundational fail-safe – which is beyond refutation and, as such, beyond democracy – can halt the process from going too far and producing something at odds with democracy. For democracies which have begun heading in this direction, it may only be a matter of time before they pass a point of no return. And as for democracies which have opted to move down the opposing path – that of installing external constitutional failsafes to prevent them from ever asking too many questions or becoming too indeterminate – they may likewise discover that the price of sustaining democracy at all costs is a price too great to pay. All this is to say: a vibrant democracy can, in the course of promoting popular debate and participation, easily endanger its own democratic order and principles by sanctioning too much democracy, leading to widespread dissent and opposition. Populist factions can rise and take power. Mass protests can, with time, lead to a politics of disturbance and a state of political chaos. And in the most extreme 18

democracy against itself cases, people’s revolutions can topple existing democratic regimes by exploiting the democratic means afforded to them. Confronted with the prospect of democratic collapse, or at least reverse waves of democratisation, democratic leaderships, groups of citizens and even minority political factions will respond in typical fashion. They will do what they can, with the powers they have, to restore order by paradoxically delimiting the very democratic principles and freedoms which enabled that democracy to flourish in the first place. This is the process through which democracy can be said to act against itself. Its logic, as this chapter has demonstrated, is neither all that complicated nor absurdly provocative. Firstly, it begins by advancing the largely unremarkable point that what makes most if not all conceptions of democracy democratic is their emphasis, to varying degrees, on notions like majoritarianism, tolerance and pluralism. Democracies abide by the former while doing their best to respect the latter. That is to say, even though majorities rule in a democracy, tolerance of all points of view should in theory still produce a pluralistic society to a certain degree. For the most part, the majorities that populate democracies are those united by a shared belief in the virtue of democratic processes and ends. Yet there have been occasions, perhaps more numerous than we would care to admit, when the reverse has been true. Nurtured by tolerant and pluralistic societies, minorities opposed to democratic ends have, as history attests, turned into majorities. And knowing that even in the most pluralistic societies where a majority emerges theirs is the view that will ultimately determine policy, non- and anti-democratic majorities have found themselves legitimately empowered to influence the direction in which their society moves. It therefore follows that were a majority of citizens in a society or country to decide after an open and fair election that they no longer wished to abide under their present democratic constitution, that instead they desired to end democracy’s tenure and to institute another form of political governance, they would nonetheless have acted in accordance with the principles of democracy despite their resolution to suspend democracy. Thanks to the fringe benefits flowing from tolerance and pluralism, majorities can form that have as their aim the disruption of democratic politics. At their most acute, these developments can and have led to totalitarian extremes, dealing democracy a terminal blow in the process. Of course, it should be said, the emergence of non- or anti-democratic majorities is not in itself an indication that tolerance and pluralism will be completely 19

democracy against itself eradicated nor that totalitarianism will necessarily be the natural product. All it does mean is that in a democracy views and policies that are non- or anti-democratic in nature can arise. And when they do, a democracy should not technically exclude them from the political domain nor deem them illegitimate where they have been backed freely and fairly by a majority. Democracy must necessarily encourage these perspectives as it would perspectives more sympathetic to its future. Unfortunately, by doing this, democracy’s own future becomes not so much predetermined as an open question. It transforms into a choice and, as Alain Touraine writes, ‘in each such situation an opposite anti-democratic choice’ is always possible.50 Those who disavow democracy – in order to advance or repudiate it – have a vested interest in its trajectory. And when these individuals and groups mobilise in large enough numbers they are rightfully authorised to immobilise the democratic process, sometimes for an extended period of time. The result of this democratic cessation will not necessarily produce authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Other forms of government not completely at odds with democracy may arise. But irrespective of what form of political governance actually emerges it will have nevertheless ended the run of democracy in its present form. These thoughts go some way to explaining why democracy can destroy itself and how it is likely to go about doing so. The thoughts expressed here capture well the phenomenon of democracy against itself; the label used to describe the process whereby a democracy sows the seeds of its own destruction. The objective of this chapter has been to demystify as well as define this process: to show that what seems a complex and provocative notion at first is something which sits at the core of democracy and democratic political processes. So construed, understanding democracy against itself becomes more than simply understanding the death of democracy. It is about understanding democracy as such.

Notes  1. Ko Maeda, ‘Two Modes of Democratic Breakdown: A Competing Risks Analysis of Democratic Durability’, The Journal of Politics (vol. 72, no. 4, 2010), 1130.  2. Id., 1129; for more on exogenous terminations of democracy, see Mark Chou, Theorising Democide: Why and How Democracies Fail (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 20

democracy against itself   3. Id., 1129–30.  4. Jan Teorell, Determinants of Democratization: Explaining Regime Change in the World, 1972–2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1, 5–6, 7.   5. Id., 21.  6. Ethan B. Kapstein and Nathan Converse, ‘Why Democracies Fail: Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 19, no. 4, 2008).   7. See, for example, Alfred Stepan, Democracies in Danger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Milan Svolik, ‘Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation’, American Political Science Review (vol. 102, no. 2, 2008); Abraham Diskin, Hanna Diskin and Reuven Y. Hazan, ‘Why Democracies Collapse: The Reasons for Democratic Failure and Success’, International Political Science Review (vol. 26, no. 3, 2005); Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975).  8. Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub and Antonio Limongi, ‘What Makes Democracies Endure?’, in Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Tun-han Chun and Hung-mao Tien (eds), Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 295.  9. Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Illusions About Consolidation’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 7, no. 2, 1996), 46. 10. Stepan, ‘Introduction: Undertheorized Political Problems in the Founding Democratization Literature’, in Stepan, Democracies in Danger, 1. 11. Andreas Schedler, ‘What is Democratic Consolidation?’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 9, no. 2, 1998), 95. 12. Maeda, ‘Two Modes of Democratic Breakdown,’ 1130. 13. Barrus et al., The Deconstitutionalization of America, 6. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. David M. Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1. 17. Ibid. 18. Zevedei Barbu, Democracy and Dictatorship: Their Psychology and Patterns of Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 5. 19. Ibid., 6. 20. Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy Still Work? (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 22. 21

democracy against itself 21. Barrus et al., The Deconstitutionalization of America, 7. 22. Dick Howard, ‘Two Hundred Years of Error? The Politics of Democracy’, Philosophy and Social Criticism (vol. 19, no. 1, 1993), 18–19. 23. Dick Howard, ‘From Anti-Communism to Anti-totalitarianism: The Radical Potential of Democracy’, Government and Opposition (vol. 37, no. 4, 2002), 551. 24. Georg Sorensen, Democracy and Democratization: Processes and Prospects in a Changing World (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), 4. 25. Safford, Democracy is Dangerous, 9–10. 26. Alain Badiou, ‘The Democratic Emblem’, in Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross and Slavoj Zizek, Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 13. 27. Anne Sa’adah, ‘Hope, Disappointment, and Self-Restraint: Reflections on the Democratic Experiment’, in Theodore K. Rabb and Ezra N. Suleiman (eds), The Making and Unmaking of Democracy: Lessons from History and World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2003), 68. 28. Alexis de Tocqueville (trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop), Democracy in America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 241. 29. Id., 235. 30. Id., 249. 31. John Keane, ‘Out of the ordinary: bad luck, disaster, democracy’, Griffith Review (vol. 28, 2010), 219. 32. John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (London: Pocket Books, 2009), xxxii–xxxiii. 33. Alexander S. Kirshner, ‘Proceduralism and Popular Threats to Democracy’, The Journal of Political Philosophy (vol. 18, no. 4, 2010), 407. 34. Id., 417. 35. See, for example, Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 131; John Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), 149. 36. Kirshner, ‘Proceduralism and Popular Threats to Democracy’, 413. 37. Issacharoff, ‘Fragile Democracies’, 1409. 38. Id., 1410. 39. Id., 1411. 40. Id., 1451. 41. David Plotke, ‘Democratic Polities and Anti-democratic Politics,’ Theoria (Vol.53, No.111, 2006), 6. 42. Id., 28. 43. Id., 30. 22

democracy against itself 44. Id., 29. 45. Claude Lefort (trans. David Macey), Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 19. 46. Nadia Urbinati, ‘Peace and Democracy: Which Ends Justify Which Means?’, New Political Science (vol. 32, no. 1, 2010), 93. 47. Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 7. 48. Id., 13. 49. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 19. 50. Alain Touraine and Kevin McDonald, ‘Democracy’, Thesis Eleven (vol. 38, no. 1, 1994), 10.

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2

Democracy in Athens: Autonomy, Tragedy and Decline

Having defined the concept of democracy against itself in theoretical terms, the following chapters will each explore how a different democracy acted, or is in the process of acting, against itself in practice. Why it is important to ground our analysis with empirical examples is clear enough. Conceptually, as the previous chapter demonstrated, it is not too difficult to make the case – several different varieties of cases, in fact – that democracies are apt to self-destruct. The logic of democracy against itself seems to make a lot of sense when viewed purely from a theoretical vantage point. But politics in reality is a great deal more messy and illogical. Often, there is very little sense to be made from what happens in the political arena. Things that are ostensibly the same on paper may actually turn out to be quite different. More importantly, only on the rarest occasions is there just one overarching reason or factor behind why something occurred the way it did. Explanations and motives are complicated and multifarious. What this means for the concept of democracy against itself is that we can never assume it materialises in the same way, for the same reasons, for all democracies. Moreover, we cannot in our attempt to study democracy against itself examine endogenous factors without also referring to the numerous exogenous influences at play. Contextual factors are always important, even if it is the citizens and the institutions of democracy that are the most immediate impetuses behind democide. To this end, the chapters that follow will analyse, compare and then contrast how a number of archetypal democracies, and the societies in which they emerged, could be said to have acted against themselves in distinctly different yet detrimental ways. The first democracy to receive this scrutiny is ancient Athens. Arguably the first of the great democracies of Western civilisation, Athens was home not so much to one as to a sequence of democracies which existed from 508/7 bc to 322 bc. Anyone who has ever 24

democracy in athens studied the history of democracy will know something of the rise of democracy in the ancient city-state of Athens toward the end of the sixth century bc. They will have read of names like Solon, Cleisthenes and Pericles, for example – statesmen who, each in their own way, worked to move Athens’ political reforms down a more democratic path. Some will even be familiar with the defining events of the Persian Wars at Marathon and Salamis, and the indispensable contribution made by the freemen of Athens. It is therefore Athens, unsurprisingly, that many contemporary democratic institutions and practices owe their heritage to. Though much has changed since that time, the Athenian Assembly and Council – respectively known as the Ekklesia and Boule – remain formative manifestations of contemporary lower and upper houses of parliament. It was through these institutions that the newly empowered citizens of Athens first learned how to participate effectively in the running and ruling of their city as more or less equals. Much has been written about Athens as a democratic epicentre. Much also has been written about the origins of democracy in Athens. In popular culture, Athens is now affectionately known as the birthplace of Western democracy; a city-state made up of active citizens and visionary leaders who, together, inspired new ways of thinking and acting in the political sense. Today, some two and a half millennia later, those who trace the source of democratic politics and thought still find themselves looking to Athens for clues and insight. But Athens, of course, was not just the birthplace of Western democracy. It was also its first resting place. Those familiar with Athenian democracy would be just as well acquainted with its forums of popular participation and the creation of greater political freedoms as they would with another, less savoury, Athens. This was an Athens which struggled to balance the push for greater democratisation with the ever-present urge to return the city to its oligarchic past; an Athens which gave to leaders unbridled political power and allowed mobs to prey on the imprudence and short-sightedness of everyday citizens; an Athens which, in short, empowered the masses to do as they will, to think themselves great, without the necessary regard for what may come from their doing so. Citizens, in this sense, empowered leaders who in turn instructed the city down a path that bred mistrust, miscalculation, war, and alliances of questionable standing – all by being democratic. This chapter explores how the citizens and leaders of Athens used or abused their institutions of popular participation to eventually 25

democracy against itself render their democracy moribund. Did democrats act d ­ emocratically – or against democracy – by deciding the way they did during the fifth and fourth centuries bc? By analysing the defeat of Athens through the prism of democratic collapse, the chapter explores why and how people power was effectively handed over to a minority of tyrants intent on seeing democracy destroyed. Rooted in what Jacqueline de Romilly calls the Greek ‘notion of rise and fall’ – namely, that ‘what now rises will sooner or later fall down’ – the chapter tackles the issue of Athenian democracy against itself from three inter-related angles: historical, artistic and philosophical.1 Historically, records tell us that the demise of Athenian democracy was more or less a casualty of the broader demise of the Athenian empire. But just what role did democracy – the citizens of Athens and the democratic institutions they used to get their way – play in this downfall? To help answer this question, and to flesh out what historical records are less clear about, the chapter draws on two key political sources, one ancient and one modern, for illumination. Drawing, first, on the democratic dramas of Greek tragedy, specifically Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy, and, second, on the philosophical teachings of Cornelius Castoriadis, one of the twentieth century’s foremost theorists on the rise and fall of Athens’ democracy, this chapter will strive to paint a portrait of the city’s decline through its democracy.

How Democracy Collapsed in Athens In the same way that classical historians disagree about when precisely democracy emerged in the ancient city-state of Athens – some point to the year 594/93 bc, when Solon established his constitution, while others point to Cleisthenes’ reforms of 508/7 bc – there is very little actual consensus over the date when democracy collapsed.2 In part, this is because democracy collapsed more than once in Athens. It collapsed for the first time toward the end of the Peloponnesian War. There, between the years of 413 and 411 bc, the citizens of Athens voted to create the probouloi and then again to abolish democracy outright owing to Pisander the oligarch’s advice: ‘what we have to think about is survival, not the form of our constitution’.3 However, democracy also collapsed a second time in 404 bc. On this occasion, democracy’s demise resulted from Athens’ defeat at the hands of their Peloponnesian adversaries. In the aftermath of war, democracy was suspended and the leadership of Athens was handed over to the 26

democracy in athens so-called Thirty Tyrants who had been installed by Sparta. Finally, in 322 bc, after nearly a century of Athenian decline and Macedonian ascendancy, democracy in Athens was dealt yet another blow. Even though many of the city’s key democratic institutions continued to operate in limited capacity after this date, this was the last time that the demos could be said to have dictated the running of the city. One can already draw several conclusions even from this cursory account. Key among them is that democracy is especially resilient. After all, for all but 322 bc, the periods of its cessation were brief and, even after it was defeated, democracy somehow managed to rise again. It is certainly true that following the suspension of democracy in 411 and 404 bc, the demos emerged triumphant. But what is also true is that, in each case, less and less power was returned to the people. In the wake of each democratic suspension, the constitution was reformed and citizenship narrowed – until, eventually, political power was for all intents and purposes removed from the masses. This democratic interregnum was one that would go on to last two millennia. As Nicholas Kittrie writes, After early democracy in Greece, the next two millennia rarely ­encountered attempts to include democracy among the means of governance. Tribal chieftainships, feudal fiefdoms, dukedoms, oligarchies, monarchies, tyrannies ruled as the predominant institutions throughout the world. Such dictatorial domination survived until the concept of democracy was reborn during the American Revolution.4

And so, after a momentary experiment in popular participation during the fifth and fourth centuries bc, democracy collapsed. For the next two millennia or thereabouts, democracy was cast out into the political wilderness, that is, when it was revived and revised for contemporary consumption. The question that this chapter raises is whether – and in what ways – democracy could be said to have played a role in its own downfall in Athens. Was there something about the way that citizenry participation was conceived and practised, some manner in which democracy’s most vital institutions and procedures were instituted, that enabled the masses to effectively vote to bring about an end to their way of government – without actually breaching democratic conventions and principles? Or was democracy’s eventual downfall merely a possible, but not deterministic, by-product of a system of governance led by the whims and fancies of a largely uneducated and irresponsible mob? 27

democracy against itself Before looking to the historical facts for some answers, let us first consider several attributes of democracy in Athens by way of introduction. Pleasantries aside, it may bemoan many democrats to concede that there was very little about Athens’ democracy that can actually be considered exemplary by today’s standards. For Loren Samons, the list of woes committed by the democrats of Athens during democracy’s brief political reign is long and damning, and worthy of reproducing in full. As he observes, Athens’ history under demokratia shows the Athenian people voting repeatedly to make war on their former friends and allies (as well as enemies), to conclude alliances with their recent enemies or with Greeks that had collaborated with Persia, to execute or exile their own leaders, to extort monetary payments from allied states that wished to be free of Athenian hegemony, to use this extorted money to fund Athenian projects (including the extortion of more money), to impose their own form of government on formerly autonomous states by force, to execute and enslave thousands of non-Athenian Greeks, to invade foreign states with massive force in order to expand Athenian power, to usurp or undercut taxes formerly paid by foreign citizens to their own states, to require religious oaths of loyalty from their allies, to refuse request for assistance from allied states or to send only token or mercenary forces to these allies, to continue and even increase state payments to themselves in the face of pressing need elsewhere, to refuse to help other Greek states resist Macedonian hegemony, and to grant honors to the very dynasts who imperilled their form of government.5

‘All this’, as Samons concludes, ‘resulted from majority votes in the Athenian assembly.’ Complicit in or compounding the lack of foresight of the citizens therefore was the democratic assembly – as well as other institutions and procedures of popular participation – which acted as a vehicle to channel the unadulterated will of the masses into the city’s official decrees and laws. What Samons describes is a city ruled not by the wise. It is a city in which the rule of the people – wise or not – overruled all else. This brings us to an obvious second democratic attribute needing attention: the citizenry. It is remarkable that democratic Athens gave to the people, the citizens of Athens, the right ‘to express and pursue their own ends’ for the first time, as Cynthia Farrar notes.6 This was a cornerstone of demokratia: that power (or kratia) would be transferred to the people (or demos). The upshot was the invention of the citizen – imperfect and limited a notion as it was in Athens – around which all later articulations of democracy would revolve. Citizenship 28

democracy in athens emerged out of the discontent felt by many who had been repressed under Athens’ former oligarchic and tyrannical regimes. Citizenship promised to the freemen of Athens (citizenship did not extend to women, slaves or foreigners in Athens) that they would now be the ones responsible for determining their own paths as well as the path of the city in which they lived.7 Individuals were thus given the right to do as they pleased, to pursue individual goals for their own individual benefit, so long as it did not interfere with the rights of others to do the same. This brand of citizenry self-interest produced many great things in Athens. At the broadest level, it helped to band the people together to act against external foes and right domestic wrongs. But citizenship that emphasises self-interest and permits the citizen to do as they will can, under conditions of hardship and war, turn into something uglier and more brutish. As Matthew Christ, author of The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens, observes, hampered by the commitments of the Peloponnesian War, a sizeable number of citizens became more interested in greed and power and less concerned about how mutual self-interest might bind the citizen with the city. The problem is that the good citizen can turn bad when, in times of desperation or scarcity, individual interest deviates from the interests of the city.8 This, for Christ, was what made citizenship in Athens inherently risky: ‘to the extent that citizens viewed their relationship with the city in these pragmatic terms,’ he notes, ‘this might lead some, through selfish calculation, to an act of bad rather than good citizenship’.9 It might lead them, as it did many in the fifth and fourth centuries bc, to be willingly deceived by the illusory promises of oligarchs and demagogues who wanted nothing more than to supersede democracy with something that was ultimately more self-serving. For this reason, as James McGlew argues, there was an unspoken connection between democracy and tyranny in Athens. Simply put, ‘tyranny is seen as a potential danger that may lurk undetected in seemingly innocent citizens and everyday political actions’.10 The freedom once solely enjoyed by the tyrant – to do as they pleased – when transferred to the citizen meant that every citizen could potentially bring about tyranny simply by fulfilling their democratic duties. But did they? And if they did, how did they do so? Answers to these questions require some history. Unfortunately, the history we require to tell this story spans the better part of a century and is both complex and contested. This is to say, depicting the chain of events which led to the downfall of democracy in Athens in a manner that 29

democracy against itself would satisfy classical historians and philologists in the space of one short chapter is unachievable. Yet for a book that provides a more generalist account, this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, broadly sketching the history involved means we only need to cite the main historical landmarks and the most relevant facts in our attempt to answer the question of whether democrats in Athens acted against their democracy. To this end, and especially for those unfamiliar with the intricate workings of democracy in Athens, it may be helpful to begin with a word about how the democracy functioned in the broadest sense, a necessary first step if we are to understand how it worked to bring about its own downfall. Here, the obvious place to start is the core of Athens’ democracy: the Ekklesia or popular assembly. As a political arena through which all Athenian citizens could address the city on all matters, domestic and foreign, it was a major political hub.11 It was here where the bulk of the city’s political decisions were debated and policies initiated. As a forum which met forty days each year, it frequently attracted in excess of 10,000 citizens at any one sitting. The Ekklesia became a crucial forum under democracy for the reason that it was citizen-led. Many voices, chaotic and disjointed as they could be, met here to determine how the city would be run and what direction it would take. Though leaders naturally arose among these men, the ultimate power resided in the demos as a whole. The more proportionally representative Boule, or Council, was made up of a smaller group of 500 citizens and it acted as a counterbalance to the Ekklesia.12 Thought to correct what could often be an impulsive, uninformed and naïve Ekklesia, Bouleutai (councillors) were selected because their age and experience, in theory, offered them a different perspective to that of the Ekklesia. But in accordance with the principles of democracy, it was the Ekklesia and not the Boule that was tasked with the responsibility of initiating and enacting new laws for the city. The Boule’s primary task was merely to act as a check and balance. Regardless of these stipulations, both of these institutions of democracy were citizen-centric. No other qualification, bar age and Athenian nationality, was required. No particular knowledge, education or experience was deemed necessary for fulfilling a citizen’s democratic obligations. And so, to the extent that democracy was premised on ‘equality’, Plato thought it conferred ‘equality to the equal and unequal alike’.13 There was no real regard to quality and substance, only procedure and form. Equality ensured that the democracy could just as easily do right as wrong. So long as proce30

democracy in athens dure and form were observed, and equality upheld, democracy could institute all manner of laws and decrees. All this bodes well for democracy and for democrats during times of plenty, when citizens are sufficiently secure, free and confident to meet their democratic duties. When the city is powerful and its economy strong, citizens can give things a go without being crippled by the associated burden that they may be jeopardising their own livelihoods and security if they decide wrongly. However, when the city is under threat, when it is ravaged by the scourge of war and plague, when its finances are in the red, democracy can begin to look very differently. In Athens, democracy began to move in this direction during the years of the Peloponnesian War. From 431 to 404 bc, this conflict increasingly became a sap on the city’s resources and a threat to its security and confidence. Though the beginnings of the war have been described as largely uneventful, with the Athenians holed up behind their city walls, Pericles’ strategy soon backfired when a mysterious plague spread throughout Athens, killing roughly a third of the population.14 Dissatisfied with Pericles’ leadership, the citizens eventually voted to strip him of power and to replace him with leaders more eager to strike an aggressive pose.15 But as the war wore on, the once poised city turned into a calculating and vicious aggressor. The slaughter and enslavement of the Melians on the island of Melos acts as one of the most iconic examples of just what the Athenians were willing to do to advance their external goals. In the domestic sphere, many citizens turned their attention to their own self-interests and, as a result, were quickly consumed by the jingoism and sophistry that took hold of the city’s democratic institutions. For N. G. L. Hammond, writing in A History of Greece to 322 bc, the war exposed the deepest flaws of Athens’ democracy and engendered a sort of cultural crisis from which it would never recover.16 With the war, the citizenry’s concern for the communal good began to slowly fade. Instead of a dedication to public service, citizens were overtaken by private anxieties and individual ends – thus confirming what Christ had thought so dangerous about the nature of citizenship in Athens. Into this uncertain milieu emerged a number of politicians and teachers who, as Hammond documents, preyed on the citizens’ need for reassurance and guidance during an uncertain time. Comprising mostly the youthful and rich, those born of noble heritage in other words, many of these sophists held the view that for Athens to find its way and return to its former 31

democracy against itself glory, citizens had to be willing to depose democracy for the old ways of oligarchy. That these anti-democratic demagogues rose to prominence in a democracy, largely by using democratic techniques, is an irony that should not be lost on us. Indeed, ‘in the dark days of the war’, as Hammond claims, ‘[e]xtremists on one side who posed as intellectual leaders had seized power by revolutionary methods. Extremists on the other side who posed as champions of democracy had exploited the superstitious fears of the people.’17 Though both were, in Hammond’s word, ‘impostors’, there was nothing that they had done which was manifestly in defiance of the democracy’s principles and practices – even though their stated objective was to overthrow democracy. There are three historical episodes that depict well the threat posed by democrats to democracy during these years, albeit each for slightly different reasons. The first occurred in the wake of the failed Sicilian invasion in 413 bc when the Athenians voted to create a body comprised of ten elder statesmen to whom they granted extraordinary powers. Feeling vulnerable and indignant after Athens’ defeat at Sicily, many citizens openly lambasted those politicians who had argued in favour of the expedition; that they, the citizens themselves, voted to take Athens to Sicily, for Thucydides, did not occur to them as hypocritical.18 But whatever the immediate fallout, Athens’ declining naval repute, its dire economic situation and the political vacuum that emerged were all factors that paved the way for oligarchy. As the once distinct differences that distinguished democrat from oligarch dissipated, the volatile environment gave those who wanted to delimit democracy both the opening and the means to do so. The creation of the ten probouloi serves as an example of how acts to delimit democracy can, in the heat of the moment, appear as democratic and be brought to fruition in a more or less democratic fashion. Elected in 413 bc, this body of decision-makers was given immense powers. They were empowered to institute new laws and reach decisions on behalf of the citizens. For some, the creation of probouloi effectively meant that the Boule had been superseded. This represented a clear shift toward oligarchy in Athens in their eyes. For our purposes though, what is interesting was how the democratic process was complicit in the production of a less-than-­ democratic outcome. As Donald Kagan indicates, the evidence indicating whether the probouloi were in fact oligarchic points both ways.19 On the one hand, there are scholars who infer from 32

democracy in athens history that the probouloi could not be divorced from the decision to eventually institute an oligarchic constitution in Athens in 411 bc, an event we will talk about below. On the other hand, that certain members of the probouloi, like Sophocles the tragedian and Hagnon the general, were known sympathisers of democracy implies that it was no straightforward oligarchic body. Yet regardless of these discrepancies, the probouloi represented a curtailment of democracy to the extent that it limited democratic franchise and empowered a small minority of men – even if some of those men were supporters of democracy. And all of this was made possible because of a democratic vote cast by the citizens of Athens. Every probouloi, one selected from each tribe, had to stand for election. Not only were there no recorded procedural breaches, there was no violence and extra-democratic plots. The creation of the body took place in ‘a thoroughly democratic way’, as Kagan writes.20 In many ways, the citizens’ decision to cede their democratic rights and responsibilities to the probouloi acted as a precursor to another key event: the oligarchic takeover of 411 bc. Known as the Athenian coup of 411 bc, it gave rise to the rule of The Four Hundred. Made up of a revolutionary group of Athenian elites, with names like Pisander, Antiphon and Alcibiades key among them, the objective of these men was to curtail if not overthrow democracy by placing power solely in the hands of an assembly of 400. The interesting, if slightly hazy, point is whether The Four Hundred’s rise to power was a direct result of a citizen vote or, more likely, of a widespread anti-democratic trend that had empowered the probouloi only two years prior. It is also unclear if this oligarchic council was voted in by the full Assembly (Ekklesia), a smaller assembly of 5,000 of Athens’ richest and most powerful hoplites or, as is regularly the case in these situations, by no one in particular. But whatever the case, it is likely that the majority of Athenian citizens would not have been outwardly opposed to having a select group of statesmen rule on their behalf during these trying days. Due to their collective fears and insecurities, the rule of The Four Hundred was made to seem appealing at the time. And so, though we do not know precisely what motivated the people, we can conclude that the citizens themselves inadvertently if not intentionally gave their anti-democratic counterparts the opportunity to rise to prominence in the years leading up to 411 bc. Fortunately, democracy was restored shortly after: first, to the rule of The Five Thousand and, then, to a more moderate form of 33

democracy against itself democracy after that. But Athens’ democracy was to be suspended again, this time in 404 bc, after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Unlike the events of 413/11 bc, however, this cessation of democratic politics occurred not because of any explicit vote by the Athenians themselves. Rather, the most direct cause of this democratic collapse came from the broader costs of war. Certainly, there were notable Athenians, such as Socrates’ student Critias, who had been colluding with Sparta all along. One could imagine that such factions would have celebrated Sparta’s decision to impose on Athens an oligarchy overseen by Thirty Tyrants. As Sarah Pomeroy, Stanley Burstein, Walter Donlan and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts note, a number of those who sided with Sparta actually found themselves selected by the victors to make up the Thirty.21 So empowered, these men were given the mandate to dismantle Athens’ democratic constitution, assembly, popular courts and council. It should surprise no one that what ensued was the creation of a form of governance that began to mirror the best of Sparta’s oligarchic system. As many former democrats were expelled or, worse still, murdered, those who remained could do little except accede to the rule of their new leaders. But vindicating de Romilly’s notion that what rises must fall, we read that by 403 bc democracy was restored in Athens for a second time. As the fifth century gave way to the fourth, Athens could thus again claim to be a democracy. However, reflecting broader social changes at the time, fewer citizens now felt obliged to participate in politics than had been the case during the previous century. Democracy became less a full-time undertaking among citizens than a more specialised profession, increasingly dominated by trained politicians.22 So things continued down this path until about 322 bc. Of course, fundamental but gradual changes in the political landscape continued to alter Athens during this period. The most crucial of which was arguably the rise of Macedon through the leadership of Philip and then his son, Alexander. Finding itself now under Macedonian rule, a state of affairs which had been brought about through the League of Corinth, Athens rested uneasily and longed for greater sovereignty of its own territories. When Alexander died in 323 bc, Athens quickly exploited the opportunity to rebel. Pro-Athenian citizens turned on fellow citizens who had supported Macedon; it was also about this time that the philosopher Aristotle fled Athens, having acted as a tutor to Alexander during the future king’s youth. Led by the Athenian Leosthenes, Athens then went on full attack. Yet the 34

democracy in athens offensive was ineffectual. By the following year, 322 bc, the uprising had been all but quashed. For good measure, Macedon responded by creating a settlement at Athens and working to slowly reform democracy. As such, this final destruction of Athenian democracy was not immediate or straightforward. It was a lengthy and organic process that slowly seized the power and autonomy that had, during democracy’s peak, belonged solely to the citizens of Athens. Having overviewed these key historical episodes, the question we come to is: how can the collapse of democracy in Athens be theorised? In the first instance, we can probably say that, on the face of things, the democratic termination of 413/11 bc differed from the terminations of democracy that occurred in 404 and 322 bc in that, unlike the former case, the latter two did not ensue directly from a citizen vote to reduce or oust democracy. Instead, they were brought about as a result of a raft of decisions made to embroil Athens in wars that would, in time, sap the city of its vigour, resources and confidence. Though ulterior motives were present, with statesmen and citizens seeking through these initiatives either to ally Athens with Sparta or bring about an oligarchic revolution, the majority of citizens did not in 404 and 322 bc want to replace democracy with oligarchy. Oligarchic institutions were imposed on Athens by Sparta and Macedon. In other words, the movement to destroy democracy did not arise directly out of democratic decision. Given this, the simple conclusion is that only the democratic collapse of 413/11 bc can be considered an instance of democracy against itself. Here, it can be said that the demos were the ones responsible for voting into power, by more or less democratic means, a minority of elder statesmen mandated with extraordinary authority to think and act for the citizenry. Though the issue of how specifically The Four Hundred came to power remains open to conjecture, it is possible to conclude that a majority of citizens were at least indirectly complicit in their rise to power. This, to borrow from Keane’s terminology, is what democide is fundamentally about: the ability that democratic citizens have to bring about the end of democracy with the use/abuse of democratic institutions and procedures. One could certainly ague that this was what occurred in Athens between 413 and 411 bc. But what about the democratic collapses of 404 and 322 bc? Were they instances of democide or something best categorised under exogenous breakdowns of democracy? The short and possibly most accurate answer is that the collapses of 404 and 322 bc were not 35

democracy against itself instances of democide as such, but rather exemplars of exogenous breakdowns. The reason is that, in both cases, it was a foreign power that was directly responsible for imposing an oligarchic coup on what had been a democratic society. Though factions within Athens were certainly championing this, the majority of citizens had no choice but to accede to the wishes of their new leaders in the wake of war. Those who rebelled, as many democrats did, either found themselves exiled from the city or executed for their dissension. However, even though we might not be right to define these two events under the category of democracy against itself, we can certainly draw a few conclusions about the nature of democracy from what happened to vindicate how, under exceptional circumstances, citizens can opt to vote democracy out of power. To this end, simply taking the view that the citizenry either had no role, or that they were duped by false prophets and leaders wanting to hand Athens over to their oligarchic adversaries in the years leading up to 404 and 322 bc, elides the actual involvement of citizens. It exempts them from the calculation of culpability and overlooks their responsibilities as citizens in a participatory democracy to be involved in the running of the city. For while it may not have been the citizens who explicitly decided to take Athens down an anti-democratic path on these occasions, it was the citizens who wanted Athens to fight, murder and enslave. Their collective decision – even if it was reached due to the persuasion of their disingenuous or foolhardy leaders – triggered Sparta and Macedon to react, in the final analysis, by imposing a form of government assured of repressing the citizenry urge in future. Perceived short-term gains, rather than regard for what may come in the longer term, pushed citizens to cave in to options that appeared immediately gratifying. In saying this, there is a risk that we become overly judgemental in our assessment of these ancient democrats. After all, it is easy to ridicule those who, in times of hardship, opted for quick fixes and the easy way out, thinking that we would not do the same if faced with similar circumstances. And so, while we may not want to exempt the citizenry from blame altogether, it may be more accurate to say that, even though poor decisions were made, the majority of Athens’ citizens would have done the best they could given the situation they were in. That they exercised their power as citizens is what matters in a democracy. And this was why Athenian democracy was so inherently risky: obscured by the shroud of war and the lack of political foresight, it was perhaps inevitable that the citizenry would do some36

democracy in athens thing hazardous to their democracy and way of life. They may not have acted overtly against their democracy in any one instance in the lead up to 404 and 322 bc. Many may have even acted to the best of their abilities to advance democracy in those troubled years. But irrespective of who acted in what way, the point remains: Athens’ democracy was subject to the whims of those who ruled over it – even when they ruled against it.

Destroying Democracy in Aeschylus’ Suppliants The Athenian story tells us that democratic choices can be potentially destructive. Democrats can, purposely or without intention, court disaster. They can make decisions harmful to their democracy, whether in the short term or decades down the line, all without having to breach any of its fundamental principles and practices. Indeed, if the events of Athens tell us anything it is that democrats can use democracy’s institutions and procedures to legitimately bring down their democracy. They can be democrats and citizens and still pursue anti-democratic ends. To be sure, many democratic citizens in Athens were actually democracy’s enemies, while others still were simply those that acted out of self-interest or on the advice of others. Whoever the citizen and whatever their motivation, though, the point is that democracy can suffer at the hands of its own. This is the idea behind democracy against itself. So real was the threat of democracy going off the rails, of being destroyed by the acts of citizens, that this theme also found its way into a number of the cultural and philosophical outlets during the fifth and fourth centuries bc. Athens, being a more unified civilisation than our own, did not separate political events from cultural productions and philosophical pursuits. Each informed the other in a way that few moderns would be able to appreciate. ‘Harmony, in a word,’ as G. Lowes Dickinson eloquently reminds us, ‘was the end they pursued, harmony of the soul with the body and of the body with its environment.’23 This explains why the affairs of state had to be pursued by other means. Equally for this reason, cultural and philosophical insights could become politically significant, casting new light on perennial political dilemmas. The art of tragic drama, which attained political prominence during the years of democracy’s rise in Athens, was one such cultural site capable of dramatising the real-life concerns of democratic life. As an institution of democracy, tragedy became elevated by 37

democracy against itself ­ emocrats because it was both a forum of democratic participation d and a form of democratic knowledge.24 The reason behind this was because ‘[t]he ancient Greeks theorized in theater as much as they dramatized theory in the Platonic cave’.25 All of which, as Costas Constantinou inserts, formed part of ‘the ambit of the affairs of the polis’. Depicting the truth that all things great risk demise, tragedy captured perfectly the emerging form of life under democracy. Specifically, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides taught citizen-spectators, who gathered in their tens of thousands to view this spectacle, that knowledge is partial at best. In other words, the self is never sufficient; there is always need for the wisdom of others. We live in a world marked by great possibility, but also by great danger. This was particularly so for democrats who were easily enticed by the allure of glory. That the essence of tragedy spoke so presciently about the nature of democracy had to do with the fact that both tragedy and democracy hinged on hubris. In Athens, as Keane writes in The Life and Death of Democracy, ‘[d]emocracy encouraged citizens to think themselves as lords paramount, as rulers of the world as they knew it’.26 In Athens under democracy, citizens took the place of their former oligarchic rulers. They were, as democracy’s name suggests, the ones who possessed the power. But what liberated them from their former overlords also made them susceptible to overstepping their own limits. To return to de Romilly: power has a corrupting tendency as it can generate in those who possess it an endless desire to want only more. ‘As things go on, the path of prudence gets narrower and narrower.’27 This is why de Romilly contends that ‘hybris and its dangers are rooted in the very nature of power’. For Keane, what therefore made democracy great in the beginning – the citizenled creation of ‘public juries, free public discussion, voting by lot’ and ‘the systematic conversion of new scientific knowledge into new technological applications’ – would eventually make it conceited, as those who claimed themselves democrats began to think and act like the oligarchs they had helped to overthrow.28 The rise of democracy and the zenith of Athenian imperialism went hand in hand, and this was no coincidence. It was, in Keane’s words, what ‘began to turn Athens into its own worst enemy’.29 And herein was the hubris that tragedy did so well to dramatise: a democracy great enough to create a citizens’ assembly where public debate and vote by lot could take place was a democracy solipsistic enough to think it could be master of the whole of the ancient world. Even more than that, a democracy 38

democracy in athens open and bold enough to hand over the reins of its leadership to an uneducated and flippant people would, in time, turn into a democracy that would tire of the very openness and procedural inclusivity that enabled it to flourish in the first place. Represented in tragedy, as McGlew argues, is precisely this image: ‘of the tyrant as a force that is always present and never resolved’ in democracy.30 A lot more could be said about tragedy and its relationship with democracy in Athens. But really the objective here is not to systematically recount this politico-aesthetic link as to draw on one tragedy, in particular Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy, to provide a prominent cultural allegory of democracy against itself during the mid-fifth century bc. Why Aeschylus and why the Danaid trilogy, one might ask? The short answer is that Aeschylus was, all else aside, ‘a democrat who fought as well as wrote’, in the words of the classicist George Derwent Thomson.31 He, like many men of Athenian heritage, took part in the defining wars of Marathon and Salamis and, thereafter, became a notable champion of democracy. As a tragedian, scholars attribute to him creations that engaged at the broadest level the political ideas and struggles of his day. For Franz Stoessl, who is an authority on classical drama, Aeschylus’ ‘dramatic art was subject to the struggle of political forces and was itself a part of this struggle’.32 Having lived through the democratic revolution in Athens firsthand, he then produced many of his greatest works in the period during which Athenian democrats and oligarchs struggled with one another for the right to determine the future direction of the city. The production of Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy, which first premiered at Athens around 463 bc, was one such tragedy that implicitly spoke to a number of political concerns arising within Athens’ democracy at the time.33 Though lesser known than some of his other tragedies, such as the Persians and the Oresteia trilogy, the Danaid trilogy is significant for our purposes because it remains the only extant tragedy that makes an explicit reference, first, to a democracy and, second, to a democratic vote which, ultimately, precipitates the former’s downfall. Called together to decide the fate of a group of foreign refugee women, Aeschylus has the citizens of mythical Argos vote to categorically receive these refugees even at the risk of inciting war with a foreign power. In this way, the drama revolves most explicitly around the question of whether ‘mercy [is] due the suppliant when hospitality spells peril?’34 But wrapped in this predicament, the Danaid trilogy also implicitly foregrounds democracy’s c­ apacity to hasten its own destruction by doing no more than letting the 39

democracy against itself c­ itizens decide. Of course, the citizens of Aeschylus’ mythical Argos do not vote to replace their democracy with oligarchy, as the citizens of Athens had done in 413/11 bc. They do nothing of the sort. Rather, more like the Athenians of 404 and 322 bc, the destruction of democracy and the onset of oligarchic dictatorship was more an un/foreseen result of former decisions made to embroil the city in a conflict that it would most likely lose. Yet regardless of these specifics, Aeschylus’ tragedy confirms for us the claim that democracies can suffer at their own hands. Citizens can legitimately, inadvertently work to bring about results that endanger the future of the very democracy which empowered them to make such a decision in the first place. In what remains of this section, the chapter re-engages the notion of democracy against itself through dramatic form. But as preface to this analysis, it should be said that the Danaid trilogy is a problematic tragedy for a number of reasons. In the first instance, it is problematic since out of the three plays that make up this trilogy, only the first play – the Suppliants – survives intact. Because of this, the actual account of the destruction of the Argive democracy, an event which takes place in the subsequent tragedies, has been pieced together only with the evidence that is available. In the second instance, contemporary scholars have found it very difficult to decipher the exact meaning of the tragedy, as the play is riddled with several key inconsistencies and unresolved tensions.35 This leaves interpreting the play a tricky undertaking if one is to abide strictly by philological conventions. However, for those less concerned about a narrow reading that makes sense only to those trained in the classics, the tragedy’s ambiguities can actually be liberating. It is this latter type of reading, particularly of the Suppliants, that the following pages provide. Simply put, Aeschylus’ Suppliants is multifaceted. It deals with many things, ranging from the supposed impetuousness of women in the ancient world; the political status of the foreign and marginalised in ancient Greece; the discord that can arise between familial ties and duties to the state; the destructiveness of war; to the nature of democracy. Here, we only focus on this last aspect: the nature of democracy. Fleeing from their homeland of Egypt, the play opens by presenting us with a group of fifty sisters – the daughters of Danaus – who have arrived at Argos, a democratic city-state of Greece. In an attempt to escape their tyrannical cousins, whom the sisters have been promised to in betrothal, they plead with Pelasgus, the magnanimous leader of 40

democracy in athens Argos, to accept them as suppliants. Recognising the ‘lawhonored signs that you claim asylum’, Pelasgus responds with a kind gesture: ‘At this point perhaps your world meets mine.’36 To which the sisters respond: ‘My clothes, my branch: your observations are not-false. But whom do I answer? Private citizen, spokesman, priest or holy prophet? Or the people’s leader?’37 Wanting to gauge with whom they were speaking so as to know what tactic to employ, the sisters ask this of Pelasgus; he replies empathetically that ‘I rule this realm’, that ‘I hold all power.’38 Thinking him no different to a pharaoh of Egypt, the sisters plead their case for asylum before him. To them, he is their sole arbiter, the one who can grant them sanctuary. But finding himself confronted with a decision that will likely embroil his city in a war with a mighty foreign power, Pelasgus suddenly shirks his responsibility. Having only moments ago introduced himself as the city’s ruler, the possessor of all power, Pelasgus unexpectedly bids to the women that: But you do not sit as claimants to the safety of my private hearth. It is the body politic, the people, that may be contaminated; in concert they who must then cure their houses and their lives of bloodghosts. And I, one man, can offer you no contract until the citizens, all of them, publicly debate your case.39

Through Pelasgus, Aeschylus thus makes two critical points worthy of fleshing out. The first is that by making a distinction between his ‘private hearth’ and the houses and lives of the ‘body politic’, Aeschylus demarcates Pelasgus not simply as any oligarchic ruler who would no doubt have made little distinction between the public and private. An oligarch’s power, conventionally conceived, extends to all realms. His ‘private hearth’ encompasses the houses and lives of the ‘body politic’. But because Pelasgus makes this crucial distinction, he therefore acknowledges, in the second instance, that in fact it is not he who possesses all power. Rather, power and the right to rule fall to no single man in Argos. In the place of one tyrant or oligarch, whose power is absolute, are the citizens who, ‘all of them’, are empowered to decide the city’s fate. What Pelasgus says of the Argive body politic clearly surprises the sisters. To them, Pelasgus is king and as king, they reason, his ‘single-voiced decrees’ should have the authority to ‘bring all debts to final reckoning’.40 As they claim of Pelasgus in no uncertain words: ‘You the people! You the government!’41 But upon hearing these words, the Argive leader is quick to repeat to the women that he 41

democracy against itself cannot grant them entry into the city without the ‘polity’s consent’, on the off chance that things do not go as planned and the people vote him out of power; as he warns the sisters in a later passage, the ‘people here enjoy disputing leadership’.42 As if fearing what the people might do to him should he decide wrongly or against their will, Pelasgus becomes paralysed with indecision. He is no archetypal tragic hero, despite displaying all the initial character traits. Indeed, if there is any such hero in this Aeschylean tragedy it is the city’s citizens – the body politic – who, after learning of the sisters’ pleas from Pelasgus, decide to grant them entry into Argos. Recounted by Danaus, who accompanied Pelasgus to the city’s assembly, the decree of the Argive people states: THAT WE BECOME SETTLERS IN OUR MOTHERLAND, FREE, SECURE IN OUR PERSONS AGAINST ALL SEIZURE AND HUMAN REPRISAL; THAT NOW MAN, EITHER NATIVEBORN OR ALIEN, DRIVE US OUT INTO CAPTIVITY, BUT, IF FORCE BE EXERCISED, HE WHO DOES NOT AID US, THOUGH IT IS HIS RIGHT AND DUTY TO BEAR ARMS, SHALL LOSE ALL RIGHTS, HIS EXILE MANDATED BY HIS PEERS.43

Unlike Sophocles’ archetypal tragic heroes Antigone and Creon, both of whom did not shirk from their duty to act, Pelasgus thus transfers his difficult decision to the people. By doing this, Pelasgus (or Aeschylus) effectively transfers the power to rule from one man to many men. Unfortunately, as the later plays of the Danaid trilogy make clear, this decision – which was the most humane and certainly the most democratic of any that the Argives could make – would come at tremendous cost to Argos and its democracy. By deciding to side with the sisters, the people also elected to make an enemy of Egypt. According to the second and third instalments of the Danaid trilogy, much of which has since been lost, the Egyptians took their revenge on Argos for its refusal to return to them what was rightfully theirs: the fifty sisters. Those who rose to defend their city – Pelasgus and, we can only assume, a sizeable number of its citizens – were slain by the mighty Egyptian army. Yet unhappy with mere retaliation, the Egyptians then made an example out of the democratic city-state. Having murdered the city’s democratic leader in Pelasgus, along with a significant portion of its male population, Egypt then dismantled 42

democracy in athens Argos’ democratic system and imposed Danaus as the city’s new tyrant. This is how the trilogy ends: with the destruction of Argos’ democracy and a plan, concocted by the sisters, to murder their would-be husbands. But the question we need to raise is what precisely this Aeschylean drama tells us about the notion of democracy against itself in the Athenian context? Thinking this question through, we can say two things of note. The first is that the Danaid trilogy may be read as a general vindication of how vulnerable ancient democracies were to being corrupted by their own citizenry. Obviously, as the passage from the Argive assembly reminds us, this was not strictly a case of a people voting to overthrow their democratic system. What was on their mind had more to do with the rights of the oppressed and their own humanitarian duties than it did with a desire to bring about democracy’s downfall. Taking this more specific reading into account, we cannot hence conclude that this was a case of endogenous termination or democracy against itself. To the contrary, the events that ensued in this tragic drama resemble much more closely the events of 404 and 322 bc when, as a result of poor choices made by the citizens, a foreign army followed up its aggression by imposing on the defeated city a more authoritarian regime. Yet what we know of tragic dramas is that they were not simply ‘charades on contemporary events’ – an observation particularly accurate of Aeschylean tragedies.44 If anything, his productions were broad allegories: dramatic metaphors and commentaries on the very nature of politics. As a metaphor in the most general sense, Aeschylus’ tragedy simply insinuates that citizens and politicians can, by fulfilling their democratic duties, bring their democracy closer to a tipping point from which it may or may not return. This first point is confirmed by a second related observation. Indeed, even if we do not take the view that Aeschylus’ tragedy dramatised the notion of democracy against itself in any explicit manner, we can certainly say that the Argive democrats voted to accept into their midst ardent anti-democrats who held views distinctly at odds with the majority of the Greek city-state. In their exchange with Pelasgus, for example, these sisters revealed that despite their allegiance to Argos, the political views they hold remain Egyptian in orientation. Unwilling to accept Pelasgus’ explanation that Argos is a democracy, these women press him to make a final decision as the people’s leader. If they had things their way, the sisters would 43

democracy against itself undoubtedly have sidestepped the people altogether, believing that one man should have the right to make decisions on behalf of the entire city. Compounding their political differences was also their denunciation of marriage and, with it, the conventions related to family, fertility and community – all of which were deeply held Greek beliefs at the time.45 By voting to accept these women as suppliants, the Argives therefore voted to give political rights to those with patently foreign and anti-democratic views. Had Argos’ democracy not been defeated militarily by Egypt, democratic acts such as the Argives’ vote to grant the sisters refuge can cause one to think that it would, with time, have been defeated democratically.

Democracy, Autonomy, Tragedy From the foregoing analysis, we can say that Athens’ democracy was predisposed to being compromised in one of two ways. First, democrats and politicians could use their influence to make decisions, with the help of the democracy’s institutions and procedures, to intentionally render the democratic process moribund. Whether by voting in oligarchs or severely reducing the citizenry’s involvement in politics, democracy was inherently subject to the whims of its people. Second, democrats and politicians could use their influence to make decisions, again with the help of the democracy’s institutions and procedures, that produce unintended outcomes which ultimately turn out to be damaging to democracy. Though only the first of the two cases can rightly be classified under the category of endogenous termination or democide, the chapter has argued that both possibilities are in fact different manifestations of the same democratic defect or potential, depending on how one views it. Both possibilities flow from the fact that, in Athens, the citizens were politically empowered to do what they desired. Their uninformed opinions outweighed the knowledge possessed by the educated and thoughtful few. This is why, in Plato’s view, democracy was so abhorrent and why, in the final analysis, it had to be conceived as a way of life likely to exhaust itself at the same time that it realised itself. To the extent that these insights have survived into the modern period, they have largely become a minority position. Both within the academy and beyond, the view about democracy has changed – in large part because democracy itself has been changed fundamentally since its early Athenian incarnation. It is not so much that modern democrats now see Plato’s warning as irrelevant. To the contrary. 44

democracy in athens Most democrats have taken his counsel to heart as they revived and reformed democracy. Nonetheless, there is still risk involved with the democratic enterprise. Contemporary democracies may look nothing like their ancient equivalents. Yet they remain corruptible in much the same way that Plato believed Athenian democracy corruptible. As such, if we are to learn about the prospect of democracy against itself, few examples are more instructive than the West’s first great democracy. This was certainly the view of Cornelius Castoriadis. Despite being a distinctly modern thinker, Castoriadis is worthy of examination here because his theory of democracy in Athens hinged on the ‘tragic’, that is, on democracy’s ability to undermine itself while attempting to complete itself. Similar in this way to Plato, Castoriadis saw democratic existence as inherently risky. Yet unlike Plato, Castoriadis celebrated this aspect of democracy. For him, the people’s opinion is preferable to the expert’s knowledge for the reason that opinion (doxa) – or better yet opinions – constitutes ‘the very breath of public life’.46 When all opinions are equally valid, when different opinions can clash and vie for supremacy, democracy flourishes. Importantly, what distinguishes opinion from knowledge (episteme) is its fluidity and contestability. Unlike episteme, doxa is by its nature political. Accordingly, rule by opinion is subject to open revision. It is temporary and valid only so long as the people are actually of that opinion. As soon as the people’s opinions change, an accompanying change in the state of affairs will likely follow. Finally, opinion is not necessarily legitimated on the basis of it being correct and prudent, even though it may very well turn out to be. For all these reasons, democratic Athens’ preference for opinion in the public sphere meant that, as a system of governance, it denied no citizen the legitimacy to speak, to be heard and to be taken seriously. But by doing this, it also rendered democracy fundamentally unstable and, sometimes, devoid of any long-term direction. To put this in more scholarly terms: under democracy, the opinions of citizens became law in Athens. Collectively, citizens were empowered not just to make their own foundational laws under democracy. They were also empowered to unmake or make them anew. For Castoriadis, this very dynamic – the autonomous nature of democracy’s design – left Athens’ democracy radically indeterminate and apt to self-destruct. It should be noted that by autonomy Castoriadis did not mean freedom or independence broadly understood. What he meant related specifically to the notion of ­self-institution: a state 45

democracy against itself in which one consciously takes part in creating – and re-creating – foundational laws. An autonomous society is a society dominated by doxa, not episteme. The laws that are instituted by necessity remain open to question and repeal – by oneself and by others. As Castoriadis once said, ‘I will say that a society is autonomous not only if it knows that it makes its laws but also if it is up to the task of putting them into question.’47 What is more, there are no external checks or balances, no fail-safe switches, to stop the process of autonomy from going too far and completely destroying previously cherished conventions in the creation of new ones. Doxa – one’s own and that of others – is all there is. Any idea or practice that is produced must itself be put to question and can itself be overruled. Autonomy demands the collaborative act of making, questioning and then revoking the foundational commandments, morals and principles that a society lives by. But this merely describes autonomy in theory. Autonomy in ­practice can have quite different consequences. After all, there can be times when continual questioning and self-institution become politically impractical, if not altogether impossible, after certain autonomous choices have been made. It is during these intervals, momentary as they may turn out to be, that the consequences of autonomy can be said to have halted the process of autonomy. For Castoriadis, Athenian democracy was the autonomous institution par excellence. In the way it operated, the city-state’s democracy explicitly recognised that its laws, institutions and beliefs had been created by the people themselves, not by some unquestionable deity or monarch. The citizens of Athens were responsible for the institution and limitation of their own way of life. As a result, democratic citizens openly critiqued and even undermined the foundations of their democracies. There was no such thing as a constitution ‘in the proper sense’, according to Castoriadis, which could stop the people from going too far.48 As a result, citizens were responsible for destroying but also remaking the city’s conventions. With no external safeguards or limits imposed on this process, democracy was thus prone to go beyond itself. ‘In a democracy people can do anything’ was Castoriadis’ observation about Athens.49 That they did not in most instances was no guarantee that they would not when the right time and the right people converged. When that happens, citizens can democratically elect to institute measures and undertake actions that can lead to their own disempowerment and the destruction of democracy. 46

democracy in athens For all these reasons, Castoriadis saw Athens’ democracy as a ‘regime of self-limitation’.50 Democracy was a ‘regime of historical risk – another way of saying that it is the regime of freedom – and a tragic regime’. For Nathalie Karagiannis, a contemporary commentator of Castoriadis’ work, what we can take away from this reading of Athenian democracy is that, as a regime of self-limitation, ‘democracy’s characteristic risk and self-revocation’ makes it an exceptionally unstable if not ‘tragic regime’.51 ‘The fulfilment, as it were, of this indeterminacy,’ as Karagiannis continues, ‘when risk becomes reality, can cause the regime’s fall, as it did at the end of the fifth century in Athens.’52 This is why, taking her cue from Castoriadis, Karagiannis argues that democracy can be said to contain ‘in itself the seeds of its own destruction’.53 Programmed to question and revoke its own foundational laws, a democracy – such as the one which existed for a brief moment in time in ancient Athens – can have one too many questions asked of it. It can permit foundational law after foundational law to be revoked by its own citizens until one day it finds that its very foundations have essentially been eroded. When this happens, a democracy can be said to have fulfilled its autonomous mission. Yet it will have done so at the expense of its own continued existence. This is the story of democracy’s decline in ancient Athens.

Notes   1. Jacqueline de Romilly, The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1977), 6.  2. See, for example, Cynthia Farrar, ‘Power to the People’, in Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober and Robert W. Wallace (with Paul Cartledge and Cynthia Farrar), Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).   3. Cited in Moss, The Collapse of Democracy  4. Nicholas N. Kittrie, ‘Democracy: An Institution Whose Time Has Come – From Classical Greece to the Modern Pluralistic Society’, American University Journal of International Law and Policy (vol. 8, no. 375, 1993), 377.   5. Loren J. Samons II, What’s Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 50.   6. Cythnia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention 47

democracy against itself of Politics in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1.   7. Kittrie, ‘Democracy: An Institution Whose Time Has Come’, 379–80.   8. Matthew R. Christ, The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31–2.   9. Id., 32. 10. James F. McGlew, Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 187. 11. M. I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 75. 12. Peter V. Jones, The World of Athens: An Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 206. 13. Cited in A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 45. 14. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 292–3. 15. The citizens did in time return Pericles to power, though he too caught the plague and died soon after. 16. N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 bc (3rd edn) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 17. Id., 436. 18. Donald Kagan, The Fall of the Athenian Empire (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 1–2. 19. Id., 5–6. 20. Id., 6. 21. Pomeroy et al., Ancient Greece, 321–2. 22. F. W. Walbank, ‘The End of Athenian Democracy’, The Classical Review (vol. 13, no. 3, 1963), 317–18. 23. G. Lowes Dickinson, The Greek View of Life (London: Methuen and Co., 1960), 253–4. 24. Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 77. 25. Costas M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 99. 26. Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, 66. 27. de Romilly, The Rise and Fall of States According to Greek Authors, 49. 28. Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, 75. 29. Id., 71. 30. McGlew, Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece, 206. 31. George D. Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966), 1. 48

democracy in athens 32. Franz Stoessl, ‘Aeschylus as a Political Thinker’, The American Journal of Philology (vol. 73, no. 2, 1952), 114. 33. Anthony J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 42–3, 60–1. 34. Herbert Weir Smyth, Aeschylean Tragedy (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1969), 10–11. 35. Aeschylus (trans. Peter Burian), The Suppliants (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), xxii. 36. Pelasgus cited in Aeschylus (trans. Janet Lembke), Suppliants (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 298–303 ff. 37. Suppliants cited in Id., 306–10 ff. 38. Pelasgus cited in Id., 315–16, 320–1 ff. 39. Pelasgus cited in Id., 452-60 ff. 40. Suppliants cited in Id., 464, 466 ff. 41. Id., 461 ff. 42. Pelasgus cited in Id., 500–8, 636–7 ff. 43. Danaus cited in Id., 825–52 ff, emphasis original. 44. G. Zuntz cited in A. F. Garvie, Aeschylus’ Supplices: Play and Trilogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 141. 45. Chad Turner, ‘Perverted Supplication and Other Inversions in Aeschylus’ Danaid Trilogy’, The Classical Journal (vol. 97, no. 1, 2001), 32. 46. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Intellectuals and History’, in Cornelius Castoriadis (ed. David Ames Curtis), Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7. 47. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, in Cornelius Castoriadis (ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis), World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 87. 48. Id., 93. 49. Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, in Cornelius Castoriadis (trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis), The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 282. 50. Ibid. 51. Nathalie Karagiannis, ‘The Tragic and the Political: A Parallel Reading of Kostas Papaioannou and Cornelius Castoriadis’, Critical Horizons (vol. 7, no. 1, 2006), 310. 52. Ibid. 53. Nathalie Karagiannis, ‘Democracy as a Tragic Regime: Democracy and its Cancellation’, Critical Horizons (vol. 11, no. 1, 2010), 35.

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3

Democide in Weimar: Militant Democracy and the Paradox of Self-Defence

Athens is important. Yet instances where democracies have acted against themselves are not limited solely to the antique past. If anything, the reverse seems true. As a form of political governance which largely fell out of favour following the failed Athenian experiment, democracy only became politically appealing again as a consequence of the European Enlightenment. The idea that each individual should have the capacity to determine their own fate and have a hand in governing themselves found favour with the new Enlightenment principles of autonomy, rationality and equality during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Since that time, democracy’s appeal has continually increased. Now, as one scholar recently noted, democracy is ‘one of the few stable features in a rapidly changing world’.1 But the paradox, or consequence, accompanying democracy’s global rise during the past century has been a corresponding collapse: one which saw a great many of the world’s newly established democracies falter and return to their former authoritarian ways. Though these democracies shared few similarities with their Athenian ancestor, they did suffer similar fates. In this respect, Athens was merely an ancient precursor in the greater scheme of things. Fast forward to our own age, roughly to the period between the First and Second World Wars, and there we can find another raft of modern democracies acting against themselves. What quickly becomes apparent when examining these so-called interwar democracies, as a number of commentators have pointed out, is just how rapidly the wave of democratisation subsided and transformed into a destabilising riptide that undermined the capacity of these fledgling democracies to consolidate. ‘There are no heroic tales to tell about world democracies between 1933 and 1939’, as Alexander Groth writes.2 ‘There are not even encouraging ones during that period.’ For Nancy Bermeo, it may therefore be true that the ‘interwar years were a watershed for democracy and for demo50

democide in weimar cratic theory’.3 But it was also true that of the twenty-six European democracies which existed in 1920, half would, by 1938, become dictatorships. This is why, as Ian Kershaw explains, ‘[t]he collapse of democracy and establishment of authoritarian systems of rule was no rare occurrence in interwar Europe. By the outbreak of the Second World War’, he contends, ‘liberal democracy in Europe was confined to Scandinavia, France, and the British Isle.’4 Despite their best intentions, only a small minority of democracy’s pundits managed to ‘make lions lie down with lambs’.5 For the rest, the sad truth was that a mix of inexperience, naivety and morass, both on behalf of elected leaders and the newly empowered citizenry, prompted a mass of people in a number of European nations to opt out of democracy for political agendas which promised a quick if extreme solution to the problems that faced them. But of all the democracies that failed during these troubled years, there is perhaps one case which stands above the defeated crowd: the collapse of democracy in Weimar Germany. Commonly considered the modern archetype of the failed democracy, Weimar has merited attention for a variety a reasons. Indeed, ‘[i]n the bleak catalogue of failed democracies in interwar Europe’, Kershaw believes that ‘Weimar Germany is a special case’.6 It is special because Germany was, despite its obvious problems, the beacon of political progress and cultural esteem in central Europe at the time. It is thus fascinating, but also disturbing, that such a progressive and liberal society managed to destroy its own democratic way of life and, with it, the lives of millions of others. This chapter reads the collapse of Weimar democracy as a modern example of democracy against itself. To do this, it will not provide a broad overview of the history and collapse of democracy in Germany in the period between the World Wars. Countless authors have already examined the intricate constitutional, social, economic and political factors behind the fall of democracy and the rise of Hitler in Weimar. As such, in order to add to these debates this chapter intends to undertake a rather specific reading of the work of a somewhat forgotten scholar whose ideas go to the heart of democracy against itself. That scholar is the German-Jewish intellectual Karl Loewenstein. By examining the life and ideas of this political thinker, in particular his concept of militant democracy, the chapter will delve into what, for Loewenstein, became politically necessary though only latently obvious in the years leading up to the rise of Hitler and the self-capitulation of democracy under the Weimar Republic: the 51

democracy against itself need for democracies across Europe and, if threatened, in the United States as well to become militant in their own self-defence. Through an exploration of what Loewenstein meant by this, the chapter highlights the democratic dangers involved when democrats act against those who have acted against their democracy.

Makings of a Militant Democrat But before we investigate his theoretical claims, and attempt to draw any links between militant democracy and democracy against itself, it may be illuminating if not useful to say a few words about Loewenstein’s early life and the Germany in which he grew up. Such a biographical account will, by necessity, also touch upon the life and aspirations of Hitler and the growing political prominence of his Nazi party within Weimar, as well as the rising disenchantment felt by many Germans during the interwar years, all of which helps to explain why Loewenstein would, in later life, become the vehement advocate of militant democracy that he did. To tell this story, the best place to begin is in Munich, even if, as Hitler would later profess in Mein Kaempf, it was not so much Munich as Vienna that ‘remained for me the hardest, though most thorough, school of my life’.7 Indeed, the political views of the young Hitler, the very same which would go on to be realised under the Third Reich, were all fomented before his move from his native Austria in 1913 to the Bavarian capital. Despite this, it was in Munich and in its many taverns and venues of popular entertainment where the young man first found his voice and with it mass appeal. In the early years of the newly instituted Weimar Republic, this city was an epicentre of mass discontent. There, political frustration and the politics of popular participation colluded; an occurrence that would in time help sweep Adolf Hitler and the Nationalist Socialist movement into power. Within the span of a few short years – and with a few electoral successes in tow – Hitler managed to attain the democratic majority he needed to systematically dismantle the democracy that had brought him to power. All this happened in Munich, the cauldron of German disillusionment and conservatism. In the city’s beer halls, those down on their luck, frustrated by the political establishment’s ineptitude, gathered in search of camaraderie and there had their political consciousness aroused and inflamed.8 Politicised thousands at a time, men and women had their suspicions manipulated. They were told that the 52

democide in weimar Weimar Republic and its system of parliamentary democracy was what had been hampering the nation’s postwar recovery. Writing as the American Consul in Munich at the time, Ernst Pope reflected that ‘Hitler never would have become Führer of the Third Reich without the help of Munich’s mass production, mass consumption guzzling establishments.’9 In much the same way that the November 1918 revolutionaries had realised before him, Hitler discovered that to tap into the popular sentiment he had to first tap into the very source of political power in a democracy. Working largely within the confines made available to him through Weimar’s democratic system – though he did, of course, blatantly violate democratic principles too – Hitler quickly mastered techniques that would enable him to mobilise the majority ultimately for his own political ends. As such, that Munich proved so fertile a ground for Hitler and his cause, becoming the Hauptstadt der Bewegung or ‘Capital of the Movement’, had as much to do with the social ferment and political attitudes prevalent in Munich as it did with National Socialism. As the crowning jewel of a historically conservative province, Munich and a great many of its residents held politically extremist views in the wake of the First World War and the subsequent creation of the Weimar Republic. If the problems associated with the city’s swift industrialisation, urban overcrowding, inflation, class divisions, and the hostility between its different ethnic groups was not enough to deal with, this bustling European hub also began to rebel against the shackle of Versailles and the pinch of the new parliamentary democracy. Munich was a city in dire straits. It was a city demanding change. As Munich councilman Michael Gasteiger confirmed in 1923, ‘Munich behind her glittering displays and intoxicating parties . . . struggles and suffers.’10 National anger, political dissatisfaction and individual pessimism all fed into the city’s politics and nurtured the reactionary political views of many residents. Simmering just beneath these public displays and parties, the people’s struggles and suffering opened the gate to Hitler’s Nazi party, which offered a clear solution to the widespread sense of pessimism and uncertainty. Suspicious if not utterly opposed to the Weimar Republic and its parliamentary democracy, large sections of the Munich population openly threw their support behind the political alternative offered to them by Hitler.11 Those that did would be among the first group of German citizens who pushed to elect, by the use of democratic mechanisms no less, an avowedly anti-democratic leader and movement. This progressively anti-Semitic and anti-democratic environment 53

democracy against itself sat uneasily within the city’s liberal and Jewish circles. Being both a liberal and a Jew, it is no surprise that Karl Loewenstein would eventually choose to flee his hometown for the United States in 1933. Yet for most of his early life at least, Loewenstein’s home was in the city where democracy’s eventual collapse had first been played out in microcosm.12 Writing years later, Loewenstein reflected that democracy’s capitulation under Weimar actually vindicated Hitler’s presentiment ‘that political power cannot be gained by revolutionary means if army and police remain loyal to the legitimate government’.13 Instead, as Loewenstein went on to surmise, ‘[p]olitical power could be won only by ballots and through “legal” methods’ – which is to say, political power in a functioning democracy is best won by democratic means. The bulk of his later works would all gravitate around the political implications that ensued from this one insight into the paradox of democratic politics. Compared to the hardships faced by contemporaries like Hans Morgenthau and Walter Benjamin – the former whose early life was marked by persecution, loneliness and segregation while the latter, threatened with Nazi capture during exile, chose to take his own life near the French–Spanish border – it has to be said that Loewenstein escaped Munich mostly having experienced only the structural obstacles and injustices which confronted many German Jews of his generation. Born in 1891 into a relatively wealthy Jewish family – Loewenstein’s father was a successful metal manufacturer and his grandfather a Stuttgart jurist – his dream from an early age was simply to work as an academic at a reputable German university. To facilitate his ambition, Loewenstein took degrees in law, history and sociology at universities in his native Munich, but also in Heidelberg, Paris and Berlin. His extensive studies, interrupted only by military service as a German infantryman during World War One, culminated with the award of a doctorate in civil and ecclesiastical law, an honour he received from the University of Munich in 1919. A talented, determined and astute scholar, his intellectual motto echoed from an early age that of the eminent German sociologist Max Weber, who believed honesty untainted by sentimentality to be the scholar’s greatest quality.14 Unfortunately, despite his academic pursuits and successes, Loewenstein failed to achieve the one thing he most desired: a permanent post in a German university. Postwar Germany was a hostile place for many of its citizens, especially to those of Jewish heritage. 54

democide in weimar Economic recession compounded by progressively racist political attitudes had the effect of creating a tiered society. For Loewenstein, this meant that even his obvious ability and family status would not be enough to guarantee him professional success. Not for want of trying, but he was eventually forced to shelve his academic career and settle for a job practising commercial and appellate law in Munich, a position he held until the early 1930s. Nonetheless, Loewenstein refused to abandon his scholarly work. Alongside his legal practice, he dedicated his spare time to scholarly pursuits, dealing with the virtues of liberalism, democracy, parliamentarianism and other political issues. However, in 1931, twelve years after he obtained his doctorate, Loewenstein’s determination finally paid off. Nearing the age of forty, he was awarded a position as part-time lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Munich’s Law School. Responsible for teaching public and international law, he was still forced to continue practising law out of financial necessity. But as events would have it, even due diligence and level-headed pragmatism would not be enough to spare him from Hitler’s tightening grip on power. And so, after only two years in his university position, Loewenstein promptly resigned from his post as lecturer in 1933. With Nazi laws prohibiting nonAryans from entering certain posts becoming more entrenched, the teaching of German law by Jews being one such stipulation, Loewenstein knew that had he not resigned first the University would certainly have terminated his employment in due course.15 His university tenure gone, Loewenstein then reached the decision, while he still could, to leave Munich and Germany behind. In that same year, Loewenstein and his wife, Piroska, left for the United States. With the help of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, he secured a two-year lectureship at Yale University. For a self-proclaimed liberal, whose scholarly work had been devoted to celebrating the democratic ideal, it is somewhat ironic that what ultimately denied him tenure at Yale was his ‘difficult personality’.16 Known to be an impatient and rather authoritarian figure in his personal dealings, Loewenstein was often described as opinionated, inflexible and insubordinate, an abrasive individual who liked to embroil himself in arguments with others.17 Despite these personal traits, he did eventually manage to receive a job offer as Chair of political science and jurisprudence at Amherst College in 1936. With no other offers forthcoming, Loewenstein moved reluctantly to the College and, though he is said to have liked the 55

democracy against itself liberal feel of the town, he left Amherst whenever he could to take up fellowships and secondments both in America and abroad. During these many absences he held a number of posts, including as Special Assistant to the US Attorney General in Washington, DC, a temporary legal advisor to the United Nations, a member of the American Law Institute responsible for drafting the ‘State on Essential Human Rights’, and a participant in the Legal Division of the United States Office of Military Government for Germany, a unit tasked with ‘deNazifying’ Germany and preparing the way for democracy. After an early life of professional adversity, Loewenstein thus found a setting within the American academy where he could establish himself as a scholar and champion of liberal democracy. As one legal expert recently noted of Loewenstein, with the Second World War looming, the bulk of his energies shifted to the ‘death struggle between liberal democracy and fascist dictatorship’ that had engulfed the whole of Europe following the First World War.18 Now that he was safely ensconced in America, Loewenstein was able systematically to explore ‘The German Question’ in ways he had simply not been able to do in Munich.

Weimar: The Suicide of a Democracy At the heart of Loewenstein’s project was the concern that democracy in Weimar had taken its embrace of political diversity and toleration too far. Though it will always be part of democracy’s DNA to encourage opposition and champion freedom of speech, Loewenstein believed that Weimar had effectively emboldened anti-democratic movements to take hold of its most cherished democratic foundations by using democratic avenues. In the tussle between democratic openness and the protection of its own first principles, Weimar democracy had clearly sided with the former. For Loewenstein, this was the regrettable and perturbing aspect about what took place in Weimar Germany: the capacity that the citizens had to do as they pleased, even if it meant voting in a leader and party whose animosity to democracy was known well before they took the reins of power. But the people might not have stood so fervently behind this one man had that man not, in Loewenstein’s analysis, adapted his vision so perfectly to the democratic methods available to him. Operating more or less within legal confines, Hitler used his oratory skills to help project his ‘magnetic personality’ on a mass scale.19 As Loewenstein explained, his message was both conveyed through ‘the 56

democide in weimar emotional mechanism of mammoth mass meetings and public demonstrations’ and ‘staged with consummate skill, showmanship, and a deep insight into the psyche of lacunae of the democratic form of government’.20 Though physical violence and propaganda remained central to Hitler’s repertoire, he knew that by and large what he desired could be achieved democratically – this being the nature or defect of democracy depending on which view one takes. In this way, what made Hitler appealing to the masses was a unique mix of his actual ‘political offerings’ and how they ‘catered to every taste’, as Loewenstein diagnosed.21 Still, for a democracy of Weimar’s stature and sophistication to effectively just pave the way for its own destruction was no small thing for many observers at the time. When the democracy was founded in 1919, shortly after the conclusion of the First World War, a sense of optimism accompanied its creation both in the Republic and elsewhere in Europe. Yet in only a matter of years, the idealism that had attended the birth of this democracy found itself mugged by the dire realities which started devastating interwar Europe. In Germany, for example, the Great Depression had the unfortunate effect of forcing middle-class sentiment from the political Centre to the radical Right, a position held firmly by the Nazi party.22 For other citizens, the grim social and economic situation slowly festered into a widespread sense of alienation and rootlessness. Already disengaged citizens were further cut off from their traditional and ‘social moorings’.23 And so, in an inhospitable environment – where deep-seated social and religious divisions, economic inflation, a contrary political culture, and a growing resentment among the citizenry towards the Republic came to dictate almost every aspect of life – democracy was easily used by its enemies.24 A short fifteen years after its founding, Weimar’s experiment with democracy thus ended in 1933 when, backed by popular support, Hitler’s Nazi party took control of the country and dismantled its democratic constitution. To this extent, the Weimar period was a time of unprecedented transformation. With respect to politics, the progress and dynamism that shaped public affairs in the early 1920s was followed by a period of decay and regress. For while Weimar was synonymous with many of the things which we associate with development, such as a good education system, high levels of literacy and unparalleled freedom in the political realm, it sadly failed to translate these qualities into lasting social traits.25 Of course, matters were not helped by the fact that, despite the democratic flavour of its constitution, many of the 57

democracy against itself citizens in Weimar were neither well-versed in nor truly receptive to the traditions of self-government. This unstable milieu was what the British historian and politician Ruth Henig had in mind when she commented that ‘Germany’s first attempt at democracy therefore took place in extremely difficult circumstances, in a country which had experienced the impact of rapid modernisation and industrial expansion in the decades since 1870.’26 If one were to go off these details then, one could be forgiven for questioning the democratic credentials of Weimar’s democracy. One might even ask how the democracy lasted as long as it did. But that would not only be an incorrect interpretation to take. It would also point us in a direction where any understanding of the nature of Loewenstein’s critique would become less likely. If anything, we need to understand how sophisticated the democracy in Weimar actually was at the time. Seen by one commentator as ‘impeccably democratic’, the Weimar constitution was a document penned by Hugo Preuss, a liberal jurist heavily influenced by the United States Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.27 In fact, in the Constitution’s first Article the purpose is clearly stated: ‘Political authority emanated from the people.’ Containing 181 Articles in all, the document represented the epitome of political compromise. It held that Germany would remain a federal state, which meant an overall reduction in the scope of power exercised by any individual state. The parliamentary system would be premised on ‘universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage by men and women over twenty years of age, according to the principles of proportional representation’.28 This ensured that political parties were guaranteed one seat in the Reichstag for every 60,000 votes won. Eventually, the low threshold for representation saw as many as thirty distinct political parties contesting in national elections on a regular basis. The diverse political representation naturally meant that coalition governments often became necessary for any one faction to be able to form government. With respect to the citizens, the Weimar constitution guaranteed equality before the law (Article 109), ensured that their homes would be categorised as inviolable (Article 115) and assured them the freedom to publicly express their opinions through words, writing or in pictorial form (Article 118). Thanks to these constitutional provisions, the German people could actively involve themselves in political affairs for the first time in their history. From questioning power to involving themselves in the distribution of resources, Weimar 58

democide in weimar democracy could be said to have based its operating procedures squarely around the will of the citizens.29 However, to steady such a system of political representation, which was egalitarian to the point of being prone to inciting disorder and factionalism, the constitution offset people power by e­ mpowering a president who, given a seven-year term, could mobilise the country’s military and dissolve parliament to stem the tide of public unrest. Specifically, under the auspices of Articles 25, 48 and 53, the president could, if he saw it necessary, dismiss his cabinet, dissolve parliament and enforce a range of emergency powers which, for the sake of ‘public security and order’, could deny citizens particular rights that were otherwise guaranteed by the constitution.30 Though the ‘general assumption in the National Assembly of Weimar was that it was not dangerous to entrust a democratic president with emergency power because he would use them democratically’, Hans Boldt reminds us the truth of the matter was often quite different.31 As he goes on to explain, ‘the broad interpretation of the terms of Article 48 which conferred the power of government by decree upon the president’ meant that ‘Article 48 was thereby used as a second method of legislation – legislation without and even against Parliament.’32 The perceived danger that this measure was created to prevent therefore posed its own set of dangers to parliamentarianism and the idea of proportional representation. It is inevitable in a constitutional system where both the citizenry and their elected leaders are empowered to such an extent that there will be potential hazards. In Weimar, most of these merely stemmed from the disorder and factionalism that was generated in the political realm, a consequence of the low threshold for political representation. Yet there were also other downsides which, as it turned out, proved disastrous for the democracy as a whole. The nature of its constitution and the democratic provisions contained within it left democrats defenceless against popular attacks. In the end, or so a commentator like Loewenstein might suggest, it may have even encouraged disgruntled citizens and anti-democratic politicians to use democratic channels to front their popular attacks against democracy. Indeed, if anything can be said with some degree of certainty about the Nazis’ rise to power it is that, more often than not, it took place within and took advantage of the very democratic processes which it would later go on to systematically dismantle. Democracy, in this sense, contributed to its own demise given that the ‘same citizenry, which democracy had created’, became for the American political 59

democracy against itself theorist Sheldon Wolin the very same citizens that ‘proceeded to vote into power and then support movements openly pledged to destroy democracy and constitutionalism’.33 The reason why both the Nazis and the citizens of Weimar could do this was because there were no defences strong enough to adequately shield the Republic from the populist appeals made by the Nazis. The Republic’s disunited parliament, coupled with a president who was given the constitutional mandate to form government, issue emergency measures and dissolve parliament almost unimpeded, left Weimar’s democracy open to the threat of serious attack and repeal. These claims are, of course, open to dispute. However, what is less disputable is the fact that the Nazis did quickly mobilise the public’s support, something they could achieve largely without breaching the Republic’s constitution. Following each election, many of which were actually called by the Nazis themselves, Hitler’s popularity slowly increased, finally to the point where he secured – with the support of the German Nationalist Party – the majority of votes in 1933.34 In this way, the route which saw the Nazis take power demonstrates just how a popular threat to democracy is possible, how it can arise quite logically in a course of democratic politicking and how, in the heat of the moment, it can actually be seen to contribute to the vibrancy of that democracy. The openness that was generated by the democratic processes in the Weimar Republic barely prevented any single individual or political faction from entering the political sphere to voice their concerns and advance their proposals. Fuelled by the sense of injustice and the dire economic situation experienced by many Germans during the interwar period, Weimar democracy enabled almost any party that had a grievance the opportunity to have a say and to influence the nation’s policies. The end product was a democracy which did not foreclose any option or deny any opinion. Such excesses of democracy can be enough to infect and corrode the polity, becoming a crucial factor leading to democracy’s eventual demise. This, we read, was what took place. As Kurt Sontheimer writes, what distinguished the political opposition in Weimer from less radical democracies at the time was that it was ‘to a great extent opposition to the Republic and to democracy as such’.35 Everyday citizens took the view that democracy had failed them. For them, democracy had to go and given that they had no effective means of bringing this about other than through their democracy this was the means they used. This is why, for Sontheimer, ‘democracy’ and ‘dic60

democide in weimar tatorship’ became so intimately entwined during the Weimar era: for the two ‘suddenly appeared, not as conflicting, but as perfectly reconcilable concepts because it might be the will of the people to have a dictator by acclamation’.36 It was the twisted nature of Weimar’s democracy which meant that these developments could not be denounced or prevented. To the contrary, backed as they were by the people themselves, the ‘folkic state of the Third Reich with its Fuhrer was thus completely in accord with these ideas which were labelled as genuinely democratic’.37 Owing to these popularly supported decisions, the German people did not have to wait long, following the Nazis’ rise to power, before democracy precipitated dictatorship. In fact, a mere week after they achieved majority, the Nazis set about dissolving parliament and then a month after that they passed the Enabling Act, which granted them the authority to rule by power of decree. ‘The Act’, writes Rosemary O’Kane, ‘authorized [Hitler] to issue laws without reference to the president or regard to the constitution.’38 Enacted in the same year that Loewenstein fled Munich, it was seen by the scholar as a clear sign that democratic politics had finally succumbed to fascism.39 Furthermore, under Hitler’s instruction, special courts were established whose sole purpose was to prosecute so-called political enemies. Finally, late in 1933, political parties of all varieties were formally banned. Not surprisingly, the final Reichstag elections which the Nazis called in November 1933 gave them 95.2 per cent of all votes cast. In his now renowned State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben thus notes that ‘no sooner was power given to him’ than Hitler went about suspending the articles of the Weimar constitution.40 This suspension, in Agamben’s reading, in effect lasted the whole twelve years of the Nazis’ rule and, because it was never repealed, meant that ‘the entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception’. In Democracies Against Hitler, the conclusion that Groth draws is this: ‘That a man of Hitler’s character, background, and outlook, within a few short years, could have risen to the mastery of a great nation, and to the domination of Europe, is an unwelcome tribute to the demagogic possibilities of political democracy.’41 In this respect, democracy provided Hitler both with the motivation and means to seek national dominance. But again we cannot forget the crucial rider which holds that in an ideal state a democracy is nothing without the will of the people or at least the majority of the people. And so, we may not be able to deny the claim, made by Hitler and his 61

democracy against itself many ­supporters at the time, that National Socialism took control primarily through their masterful use of the democratic machinery. However, without the support of a substantial number of its citizens – not to forget those that the Nazis were able to coerce as well – the democratic machinery would have been more hindrance than aid. Unfortunately, it is widely known that during the years of its existence, the Weimar Republic and its system of parliamentary democracy was opposed by a clear majority of its citizens. Writing as early as 1928, the German historian Wilhelm Mommsen noted that ‘the German republic movement was not the result of a great republic movement and of republican aspirations of broad circles of our people but it arose as the only possible form for the new state after the collapse at the end of the World War’.42 Later, in his 1932 book The Crisis of German Democracy, Herbert Kraus concurred, saying: ‘Numerically the greatest part of the German people, and above all the strongest and most energetic factors among them, are today anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-­parliamentarian.’43 And finally, a third statement again from Sontheimer, who claimed in a Norddeutscher Rundfunk broadcast, later republished in the 1964 anthology The Road to Dictatorship: ‘Neither would the structural weaknesses of the Republic have been sufficient on their own to make [the collapse of Weimar democracy] inevitable if they had not coincided with fateful political decisions made by individuals.’44 These individuals, it should be noted, many of whom associated with Germany’s veterans’ and farmers’ leagues and who comprised a number of the country’s most prominent middle-class organisations, aligned with Hitler not necessarily out of agreement with his ultimate vision. Rather, lacking the support to affect change by themselves, they joined with the eventual Führer because they saw in him their greatest chance to bring the Republic to its knees.45 Their opposition, like the majority of citizens in Germany at the time, was not directed primarily at any one particular party, policy or motion; what they opposed was the very idea of democracy itself. Theirs was an antidemocratic leaning. United less by what they stood for than what they stood against, ‘they all saw the existing Republic as an enemy and not as an object of loyalty’, writes Sontheimer, which meant ‘their final effect on the Weimar Republic was destructive’.46 On this account, the people who voted for Hitler and supported his anti-democratic vision through the use of democratic channels must be equally held responsible for bridging the chasm between 62

democide in weimar democracy and dictatorship. Through their actions, they disproved the assumption, often taken as granted in liberal ideology, that education, literacy and political freedom will lead to a lasting and stable democracy.47 But lacking in popular support, pro-democratic political parties in Weimar neither had the resources nor the mandate to save democracy from itself. In the end, they were actually thwarted by the very democracy they were desperately trying to save. This, for the British historian Richard Bessel, is why ‘[t]he question about the collapse of the Weimar Republic’ will forever taint ‘the viability of democratic politics’ in all its forms.48

Loewenstein’s Case for Militant Democracy Taken together, what took place in Weimar can be ‘explained less as a case of the murder of the democratic republic than of its suicide’.49 Karl Loewenstein would have understood precisely what this meant. As a firsthand witness to democracy’s suicide, he would have seen just how dangerous the ideas and decisions unfolding in Munich’s mass gatherings, public rallies and democratic elections were becoming. Intoxicated by the promises and fervour that many had first experienced in the beer hall, the people, it seemed, knew what they wanted: to destroy the Weimar Republic. As a key political battleground, the type of politicking that was allowed to squeeze the life out of Weimar’s democracy was in large part honed in the city of Loewenstein’s birth and where, for the first half of his life, he formed what would in time become his case for the defence of democracy against itself. Published a mere two years after his move to the United States, Loewenstein’s first major English publication, ‘Autocracy Versus Democracy in Contemporary Europe, I’, reflected on the events in Europe and the implications for democracy. Noting how ‘recent, and even surprising’ a phenomenon democracy was when compared to autocracy, he went on to lament the former’s demise across the continent. As he writes, Scarcely two decades ago, discussion ran high over the value of monarchy; parliamentary democracy appeared as the inescapable solution. At present, democracy is everywhere on the defensive, and the victory of autocracy seems hardly less inevitable than formerly the universal acceptance of democracy. Fear persists today more than ever that the contagious spread of dictatorships cannot be checked. Is there an immunity against the virus of dictatorship, or must it be taken for granted that in the course 63

democracy against itself of the next few years more, or even all, of the European democracies still enjoying the rule of law will succumb to the fascist onslaught?50

The slide back to autocratic regimes in what had been some of Europe’s newest and most vibrant democracies was a frightening – even deadly – prospect for Loewenstein. Most troubling of all was how inconspicuous the denunciation of democracy had been in some erstwhile democratic systems. Indeed, in almost all of the democracies that committed suicide during these years, the opposition to democracy emerged organically. It developed in ways not dissimilar to other forms of political opposition which did not seek democracy’s overthrow. As if in harmony with the country’s democratic traditions and conventions, these movements learned to operate within democracy, understanding that this was their most effective and legitimate channel to garner the public support needed. Labelled the ‘fascist technique’, Loewenstein’s point was that in many cases the anti-democratic threat experienced in these countries was difficult if not impossible to discern from normal, everyday democratic politics – that is, until the damage had already been done.51 That this was so had to do with the democratic tendency not to exclude from the political arena ideas or perspectives detrimental to its own survival. There was certainly a case to be made that democratic ‘magnanimity’ was intrinsically ‘suicidal’; for him, democracy was at its dangerous best when it ‘sharpened the dagger by which it was stabbed in the back’.52 After all, there was no secret that the National Socialist party in Germany had a vision that was unreservedly anti-parliamentarian. Yet far from shutting them out of the country’s political arena and denying them due democratic rights, ‘by the generous and lenient Weimar republic’, which was helped along by will of the people, Loewenstein notes that ‘Hitlerism was allowed to use democracy for the avowed and explicit purpose of destroying democracy.’53 As this was permitted to occur, he concluded that the ‘democratic constitution became the main obstacle against its maintenance and the best tool for its destruction’. This insight, crucial to Loewenstein’s critique, would plague the intellectual and go on to inform much of his postwar thinking. Certainly, as war again loomed over Europe, Loewenstein’s fascination with the collusion between the ‘fascist technique’ and ‘democratic openness’ only intensified. Coincidental with the spread of fascism and the demise of democracy, he became even more adamant that the fascist technique ‘could be victorious only under the extraor64

democide in weimar dinary conditions offered by democratic institutions’.54 ‘Its success’, he continued, ‘is based on its perfect adjustment to democracy. Democracy and democratic tolerance have been used for their own destruction.’ Rightly or wrongly, democracy becomes its own worst enemy when it is unwilling or unable to muster resistance to anti-democratic forces. For Loewenstein, this blindness and naiveté had immobilised too many democratic regimes precisely when they needed to act. His indictment, most powerfully articulated in what would arguably become his most influential article, ‘Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights’, articulated his critique in this way: Democracies are legally bound to allow the emergence and rise of antiparliamentarianism and anti-democratic parties under the condition that they conform outwardly to the principles of legality and free play of public opinion. It is the exaggerated formalism of the rule of law which under the enchantment of formal equality does not see fit to exclude from the game parties that deny the very existence of its rules.55

Though the collapse of Weimar democracy was too multifaceted to be reduced to monocausal factors, Loewenstein was certain that the lack of so-called ‘militancy of the Weimar Republic against subversive movements’ was the democracy’s most glaring mistake.56 The perceptiveness and tenor of his indictment was such that it would be echoed by subsequent scholars who shared the view that, though no single factor was responsible for the fall of democracy in Weimar, the susceptibility of its democratic constitution to anti-democratic forces certainly made it vulnerable from the outset.57 As such, that Weimar democracy should have initiated self-­ defensive measures, or become a militant democracy, is for Loewenstein abundantly clear. Again, we can attribute his personal familiarity with what transpired in Munich and Germany as stimulus for this cure; his was after all a ‘very German’ solution according to the legal expert Rande Kostal.58 He was no different to many German Jewish émigrés. As Peter Stirk points out, having escaped Nazism with their lives intact, many Jews dedicated their lives trying to comprehend ‘the forces that had driven them into exile and especially on the nature of the Third Reich’.59 How Loewenstein contributed to this cause was with his breakthrough in thinking that fire must be ‘fought with fire’.60 While this statement is easy enough to understand on its own given the context, what he meant was effectively this: as a technique, fascism 65

democracy against itself can ­certainly be defeated by democracy – but only if democracy takes the game to fascism’s own playing field and learns to play by fascism’s own set of rules. In other words, democracy must do to fascism what fascism learned to do to democracy. It must become militant. A militant democracy is a regime which signals that it has understood the internal popular threat and is now willing to do what has already been done to it: to deploy techniques that exploit the fascist enterprise but, this time, for democratic ends. Conscious of the threat it faces, a democracy can break the spell of fascism and begin to take back, through the enactment of anti-fascist legislation, what it has lost.61 But fighting fire with fire means that democracy must in the interim jettison aspects of what it has stood steadfastly for. Fundamental rights, fair play, along with freedom of speech, assembly and press – these are just some of the cornerstones which the fight against fascism demands that democracy forego. At this point, Loewenstein is quick to reassure those who might despair the suspension of fundamental democratic rights. Justifying his proposal, he reasons: Few seriously objected to the temporary suspension of constitutional principles for the sake of national self-defense. During war, observes Leon Blum, legality takes a vacation. Once more, democracy is at war, although an underground war on the inner front. Constitutional scruples can no longer restrain from restrictions on democratic fundamentals, for the sake of ultimately preserving these very fundamentals. The liberal-democratic order reckons with normal times . . . When the ordinary channels of legislation are blocked by obstruction and sabotage, the democratic state uses the emergency powers of enabling legislation which implicitly, if not explicitly, are involved in the very notion of government.62

This is to say, when taken hostage by the fascist technique, a democracy is within its rights to pool its resources and empower the democratically elected government to cut the airflow off to its fascist saboteurs in any way possible. Temporarily suspending fundamental democratic rights, ‘even at the risk and cost of violating’ them, is inescapable and thus excusable according to Loewenstein’s logic.63 Accidentally harming innocents, though regrettable, must not deter democrats from becoming militant. There is no long-term danger that defensive efforts to save democracy may unintentionally go too far and themselves begin to erode and strangle democratic vibrancy. Proposing fourteen categories of legislative defences, Loewenstein’s measures are purposely broad and far-reaching.64 These measures cover all the usual suspects – ranging from acts of high treason and 66

democide in weimar coups d’état to restrictions placed on the public use of firearms and the creation of a so-called political police force to monitor antidemocratic activities. Together, they provide a manual for how a democracy can become militant. Yet of the fourteen categories he proposed, arguably only five explicitly redress the germ of democracy against itself, that is, where the ‘fascist technique’ is at its most effective. The first and most extensive, according to Loewenstein, entails measures to ban subversive movements altogether from the political arena. Yet because subversive movements can often be difficult to distinguish from other political movements in a vibrant democracy, thereby threatening to violate democratic guarantees of equality and due process on a potentially mammoth scale, such prohibitions need to be, in the second instance, targeted solely at groups seeking ‘unlawfully to usurp functions ordinarily belonging to the regular state authorities’.65 Third, as Loewenstein continues, militant democracies must be on the guard against political extremists who would abuse parliamentary institutions by enacting legislation that explicitly prevents the inclusiveness of parliamentarianism from being used against itself. The fourth measure, perhaps the one most likely to infringe on the democratic rights of everyday citizens, holds that freedom – of speech, press and assembly, for example – must be robust enough to be denied to the public when subversive factions threaten to undermine the existing system. Through criminal codes that sanction the misanthropic use of the press, of free speech and of public gatherings for anti-establishment causes, democracies can deal subversive movements the death blow before they have chance to take hold. Finally, the last stipulation against democratic suicide is directed at a democracy’s leaders and officials. Realising that even the most draconian laws can be ineffectual if the elected leaders and officials share anti-democratic sympathies, Loewenstein therefore makes it clear that the state should remove any such individual from their position of influence. ‘To permit public officials’, as he writes, ‘to endorse anti-democratic parties, or actively support them, would be an undue demand on the generosity of democratic fundamentalism.’66 And it must be stamped out. These measures are necessary protections against parties and movements that would use democracy’s leniency in an effort to overturn democracy. In order to thwart such self-destructive tendencies, democrats must have at their disposal effective self-defence techniques. Which brings us to an important point of Loewenstein’s: 67

democracy against itself ‘The most perfectly drafted and devised statutes are not worth the paper on which they are written unless supported by indomitable will to survive.’67 In other words, self-defence techniques are useless if not backed by the will of the majority to retaliate against and thus survive the anti-democratic challenge. Lacking that and a democracy will have effectively surrendered itself, along with its future, to those intent on seeing it destroyed.

The Paradoxes of Loewenstein’s Militant Democracy Loewenstein, of course, was not the first to write on these matters. Nor was he the last. Although republished as a 1984 Salmagundi translation, Raymond Aron was another scholar who touched on the association between democratic and totalitarian states as early as the 1930s.68 For him, it was clear then that democracies had to prove they were ‘capable of the same virtues’ as totalitarian governments at a time when democratic disenchantment was sweeping through Europe. He understood, in much the same way Loewenstein did, that popular majorities or the ‘sovereignty of the people’, in his words, ‘can lead to despotism just as easily as to liberty’.69 Some seventy years later, as Jan-Werner Müller argued in a recent New Left Review essay, the ‘highly constrained form of democracy’ that emerged in Germany and in other Western European countries ­following the conclusion of the Second World War still resonate with our own.70 Identifying the centrality of Karl Loewenstein’s contribution to the development of more militantly democratic regimes, Müller goes on to note that by ‘weakening parliaments and, in particular, restraining the ability of legislatures to delegate power . . . the kind of suicide the Weimar Republic’ committed was prevented from recurring again during the twentieth century.71 And that, for him, has a lot to do with the legacy of Loewenstein’s work, which remains visible, even four decades after his death, in the ways mature democracies are now functioning in Europe and elsewhere. For these reasons, the work of this little-known Jewish jurist, whose ideas fell out of favour within the American academy late in his life, deserves another look. After all, it is thanks to Loewenstein’s scholarship that we have a clearer appreciation of just what a modern democracy can do to itself if given the chance. Moreover, because of him, in almost all democracies now there are self-defensive techniques in place to prevent them from unravelling. But in Loewenstein’s idea there is a crucial paradox that he never 68

democide in weimar adequately addressed. Simply put, it asks: does militant democracy really prevent a democracy from committing suicide or is it, on the contrary, itself an act of democratic suicide? This question may seem a little sardonic, if for no other reason than that democracies, in Germany and elsewhere, have gone from strength to strength since the fall of the Third Reich more than half a century ago. Democracies are everywhere on the ascendant and they have, for quite some time, been experiencing what Colin Crouch calls a ‘world-historical peak’.72 Owing in large part to the type of measures suggested by Loewenstein, contemporary democracies have become more aware and better equipped to deal with the ‘fascist technique’. How then can what Loewenstein proposed – for he was an ardent champion of democracy, after all – be seen as detrimental to the life of democracy? True, Loewenstein was an avowed democrat whose proposals concerning militant democracy were largely reflective of his animus towards the rise of fascism. Yet contained within his call to arms, perhaps as one might expect of any militant strategy, is a set of contradictions that taint his theory and have the capacity to place his defence of democracy in the same category as the fascist techniques he worked so hard to defeat. Take, in the first instance, the manner in which the theory of militant democracy contradicts and undermines Loewenstein’s own definition and understanding of democracy. Writing in a 1946 article titled ‘Freedom Is Unsafe Without Self-Government’, Loewenstein declared that ‘[n]o one has found a better definition of political democracy than Lincoln’s: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.”’73 Elsewhere he adds to this with the qualification that a democracy ‘consists in the attempt to establish an equilibrium between the various competitive plural forces within the state society, with due regard to the free unfolding of the human personality’.74 Having said this, how can we understand Loewenstein’s stipulation that democracy needs to be re-understood, at least until humankind has fully adjusted to the new technological age, as ‘the application of disciplined authority, by liberal-minded men, for the ultimate ends of liberal government: human dignity and freedom’?75 Imploring us not automatically to shun the concept of ‘authoritarian’ democracy, Loewenstein’s militant democracy may thus satisfy one, at best two, of Lincoln’s three definitional cornerstones. Under a militant democratic regime, government may well be for the people and even by the people, but it will rarely be of the people. The ultimate ends of the liberal government that Loewenstein writes of, human 69

democracy against itself dignity and freedom, will have been attained through a means and at a cost not entirely amenable with that end. Eerily then, Loewenstein’s own definition of democracy strays inadvertently close to his definition of autocracy. As he defines it, autocracy can be understood as ‘a political organization in which the single power holder – an individual person or “dictator”, an assembly, a committee, a junta, or a party – monopolizes political power without permitting the power addressees an effective participation in the formation of the will of the state’.76 And as a further indictment against himself, Loewenstein was quite clear that no government should be considered legitimately democratic if it, firstly, was not fairly and freely elected by a majority of the people and, secondly, if it denies to other political parties the right to participate freely in elections and other democratic activities.77 Again, militant democracy satisfies the first but not the second requirement. In short, the point seems to be that so long as the ‘rights of the power addressees . . . do not affect the exercise of political power’ then they should remain protected and otherwise unaffected under a regime of militant democracy.78 However, if they do affect the exercise of power, then no democratic provisions will ensure their safety. Of course, as we may have suspected, Loewenstein explained these ‘contradictions’ away by deferring to the Blum quote that legality must be sidelined during times of war. Even Lincoln understood the need to deny to certain democratic citizens certain democratic rights during times of strife. As temporary measures, enacted at the height of the American Civil War, they came into effect provisionally and only to exclude those factions intent on undermining the game from participating in the first place. The rationale and uses of Loewenstein’s militant democracy are no different. But regardless of how he resolves this paradox in his mind, Loewenstein may have been closer to the truth than he realised when he acknowledged that crucial aspects of militant democracy will, by necessity, have to undercut crucial aspects of liberal democratic politics to be effective. For instance, it is true that enabling legislation, which Loewenstein saw as innate to the notion of government, may save democracy under certain circumstances. Yet to return to the German case, it was precisely through the use of enabling legislation that enabled Hitler to move against the democracy he had been elected to defend. Consequently, enabling legislation, while created to protect democracy against itself, is nevertheless legislation which sanctions the suspension of democratic rights and responsibilities. 70

democide in weimar It gives to those who wield it the capacity to terminate democracy’s tenure, even if only very briefly. This goes to the heart of the ‘paradox of militant democracy’ that Alexander Kirshner has recently identified: namely, ‘the possibility that efforts to stem challenges to democracy might themselves lead to the degradation of democratic politics or the fall of a representative regime’.79 In large part, this so-called paradox touches upon the much broader intellectual debate about procedural versus substantive conceptions of democracy. While some aspects of this debate have already been canvassed in previous chapters, we can say that Loewenstein’s view of democracy tends toward a substantive understanding whereas the fascists he opposes exploit a very minimal view of procedural democracy. The important point to note here is that democratic proceduralists like to emphasise the ‘procedures’ which allow for competitive dialogue between political antagonists, each of whom is said to possess views of equal worth. For Joseph Schumpeter, democracy via proceduralism is premised on the ‘institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the decisionmaking but does not prescribe the decisions themselves’.80 Guided by one requirement – that of majority rule – democratic proceduralism therefore gives democratic supporters and agitators alike the opportunity to do their best to win the majority. Proceduralism does not hinge on what is proposed so long as it has been proposed in the right manner to allow the citizens to pick and choose for themselves. The substantive view of democracy, on the other hand, repudiates the democratic credentials of proceduralism, preferring instead to define democracy more meaningfully. According to Gregory Fox and Georg Nolte, substantive democrats would thus hold that while democracy is ‘permissive’ by nature, it must not permit for its own ‘alienation’ or destruction.81 What matters, above and beyond the procedures in a democracy, is the creation of a society where the concept of ‘the people’ is enduring; a foundational notion which cannot be swept aside by a particular group of people holding grudges against the operation of democracy at a particular time. In this way, beyond the procedures themselves, it is the substance of what is proposed that must be used to determine what is and is not democratic. Only the substance matters. The distinguishing factor of Loewenstein’s militant democracy when compared to the fascist technique is that the former permits the use of less than democratic means if they can produce d ­ emocratic 71

democracy against itself ends (or substance), while the latter employs more or less democratic means (or procedures) to achieve ends which may or may not be democratic in substance. Both are in principle democratic, just as both can in principle become anti-democratic. The question one might want to ask is which is more democratic – is democracy the sum of its procedural parts or is it something more substantial, a foundational set of principles that exist independent of all else? Moreover, can democracy ever really be said to exist in substance if its processes have been compromised along the way? How one answers this question and its subsidiary parts will likely determine just where one stands when it comes to the paradoxes of militant democracy. But regardless of what one decides, there is no getting away from the realisation that there is something to the paradox of militant democracy that echoes the very paradox which unfolded in the Weimar Republic: whereby a democracy, attempting to uphold and sustain attributes fundamental to its survival, unwittingly jeopardised its own existence. If this is indeed the case, if militant democracy is merely the other side of democide’s coin, then we may want to say that whatever its paradoxes, they must certainly be preferable to those of a democracy which is permitted to tear itself apart. And we may be right, at least when it comes to the case of Weimar and the mass slaughter it precipitated. Yet what of the militant measures now in place within our own democracies – the emergency measures that come into effect during so-called states of emergency and the increasing power of executives, corporations and political lobbyists – put there by democratically elected governments? These measures are now commonly deemed as necessary to ensure the state’s survival, even if they do undermine the already shaky division between ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’ in the process. Can we say with the same level of confidence that democratic ends in these instances justify the less than democratic means? If we cannot, if we, on the other hand, see the democratic process as the only tangible assurance that we have of there ever being anything close to a democratic end, then maybe we might just have to run the risk of repeating past mistakes if only to ensure that democracy has a chance at a future. Such are the matters we turn to now.

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democide in weimar

Notes  1. Roland Bleiker, ‘Visualizing Post-National Democracy’, in David Campbell and Morton Schoolman (eds), The New Pluralism: William Connelly and the Contemporary Global Condition (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 121.   2. Alexander J. Groth, Democracies Against Hitler: Myth, Reality and Prologue (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 2.  3. Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 21.   4. Ian Kershaw, ‘Introduction: Perspectives of Weimar’, in Ian Kershaw (ed.), Weimar: Why did German Democracy Fail? (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 1.  5. Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy, 568.   6. Id., 1.   7. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kaempf (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1971), 125.  8. Jeffrey Gaab, ‘Hitler’s Beer Hall Politics: A Reassessment based on New Historical Scholarship’, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science (vol. 1, no. 20, 2011), 36.  9. Sterling Fishman, ‘The Rise of Hitler as a Beer Hall Orator’, The Review of Politics (vol. 26, no. 2, 1964), 255. 10. Robert Eben Sackett, Popular Entertainment, Class, and Politics in Munich, 1900–1923 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), 106. 11. Id., 105; William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1930–1935 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1966), 100. 12. R. W. Kostal, ‘The Alchemy of Occupation: Karl Loewenstein and the Legal Reconstruction of Nazi Germany, 1945–1946’, Law and History Review (vol. 29, no. 1, 2011), 3, 8–9. 13. Karl Loewenstein, Hitler’s Germany: The Nazi Background to War (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940), 3. 14. Kostal, ‘The Alchemy of Occupation’, 6. 15. Karl Loewenstein Papers, 1822–1977 (bulk 1908–1973), Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, http://asteria.fivecolleges. edu/findaids/amherst/ma206_bioghist.html. 16. Kostal, ‘The Alchemy of Occupation’, 7. 17. Kostal, Id., 20; Karl Loewenstein Papers. 18. Kostal, ‘The Alchemy of Occupation’, 9. 19. Loewenstein, Hitler’s Germany, 6. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, 37. 73

democracy against itself 23. Groth, Democracies Against Hitler, 36. 24. Peter C. Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 1; Stephen E. Hanson, Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Reich France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 123. 25. Groth, Democracies Against Hitler, 19. 26. Ruth Henig, The Weimar Republic 1919–1933 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), xi. 27. Stephen J. Lee, The Weimar Republic (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 17. 28. Ibid., 17. 29. Richard Bessel, ‘Why Did the Weimar Republic Collapse?’, in Ian Kershaw (ed.), Weimar and Hitler: Why did German Democracy Fail? (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 121. 30. Raffael Scheck, Germany, 1871–1945: A Concise History (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008), 116–17. 31. Hans Boldt, ‘Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, its Historical and Political Implications’, in Anthony Nicholls and Erich Matthias (eds), German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler: Essays in Recent Germany History (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1971), 88. 32. Id., 96. 33. Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 53. 34. Rosemary H. T. O’Kane, Paths to Democracy: Revolution and Totalitarianism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 132. 35. Kurt Sontheimer, ‘Anti-democratic Thought in the Weimar Republic’, in Lawrence Wilson (trans.), The Road to Dictatorship: Germany 1918–1933 (London: Oswald Wolff, 1964), 44. 36. Id., 51–2. 37. Id., 52. 38. O’Kane, Paths to Democracy, 132–3. 39. Loewenstein, Hitler’s Germany, 20. 40. Giorgio Agamben (trans. Kevin Attell), State of Exception (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 41. Groth, Democracies Against Hitler, 18. 42. Wilhelm Mommsen cited in Henig, The Weimar Republic 1919–1933, 78. 43. Herbert Kraus (ed. and intro. William Starr Myers), The Crisis of German Democracy: A Study of the Spirit of the Constitution of Weimar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1932), 5. 74

democide in weimar 44. Sontheimer, ‘Anti-democratic Thought in the Weimar Republic’, 42. 45. Id., 45. 46. Ibid. 47. Groth, Democracies Against Hitler, 19. 48. Bessel, ‘Why Did the Weimar Republic Collapse?’, 121. 49. Peter M. R. Stirk, Twentieth-Century German Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 55. 50. Karl Loewenstein, ‘Autocracy Versus Democracy in Contemporary Europe, I’, The American Political Science Review (vol. 29, no. 4, 1935), 574. 51. Id., 579. 52. Id., 580. 53. Ibid. 54. Karl Loewenstein, ‘Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, I’, The American Political Science Review (vol. 31, no. 3, 1937), 423. 55. Id., 424. 56. Id., 426. 57. Lee, The Weimar Republic, 99. 58. Kostal, ‘The Alchemy of Occupation’, 10. 59. Stirk, Twentieth-Century German Political Thought, 109. 60. Karl Loewenstein, ‘Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, II’, The American Political Science Review (vol. 31, no. 4, 1937), 656. 61. Loewenstein, ‘Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, I’, 431. 62. Id., 432. 63. Ibid. 64. Loewenstein, ‘Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, II’. 65. Id., 646. 66. Id., 655. 67. Id., 657. 68. Raymond Aron (trans. Anthony M. Nazzaro), ‘Democratic States and Totalitarian States’, Salmagundi (vol. 65, 1984), 36. 69. Id., 38–9. 70. Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Beyond Militant Democracy’, New Left Review (vol. 73, 2012), 41. 71. Id., 43. 72. Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 1. 73. Karl Loewenstein, ‘Freedom Is Unsafe Without Self-Government’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (vol. 243, 1946), 47. 74. Karl Loewenstein, Political Power and the Governmental Process (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), 7. 75. Loewenstein, ‘Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights, II’, 657–8. 76. Loewenstein, Political Power and the Governmental Process, 55–6. 75

democracy against itself 77. Loewenstein, ‘Freedom Is Unsafe Without Self-Government’, 48. 78. Loewenstein, Political Power and the Governmental Process, 56. 79. Alexander S. Kirshner, A Theory of Militant Democracy, unpublished dissertation, Yale University, 2011, Accessed from http://pantheon.yale. edu/~alkirsh/Site/Papers_files/Kirshner%20Dissertation%20Chap­ ter%20 1.pdf. 80. Joseph Schumpeter cited in Fox and Nolte, ‘Intolerant Democracies’, 14. 81. Id., 16.

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4

The Coming Authoritarianism: The State of America’s Democracy

In late 2011, The Wall Street Journal published an article with the curious title ‘Democrats Against Democracy’.1 Written by James Taranto, one of the Journal’s conservative columnists, the piece documented a disturbing trend seen to be besetting democracy in America. Taranto claimed that American citizens, especially those who identified themselves as liberal and progressive, were increasingly turning their backs on democracy. Quoting from a New York Times editorial by Nicholas Kulish, Taranto observed that: ‘From South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.’2 Taking to the streets is thus seen as the next best thing for citizens who now ‘have little faith in the ballot box’; protest and dissent is the political act of choice for voters who no longer see democracy as accountable, workable or worthy of their patronage.3 Though these disaffected democrats may not necessarily be ‘agitating for a dictator to take over’, a point Kulish emphasises in his article, their displeasure at democracy and their desire for change is nonetheless distressing. It is distressing because there is much here that is evocative of the recent movements which culminated with the overthrow of dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen.4 And that is Taranto’s worry. Indeed, for Taranto, the disaffection now working its way into democracy in the United States is similar to what has been felt in quarters of the globe where democracy was never anything more than an uncertain experiment in political governance. The rally cry that ‘voting is worthless’, that democracy is all promise and no delivery, is ‘increasingly heard in America’, as Taranto writes; and this is a gripe not solely heard ‘from street protestors but from traditional politicians, especially Democrats, and their supporters in the liberal elite media’.5 That is the shift which most concerns Taranto: the one which sees democrats in the United States turning away from their democracy. 77

democracy against itself As peculiar as this may sound, this ideological about-face has been spurred on by some quite practical justifications. According to North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue, for example, more democrats should be toying with such ideas as suspending ‘elections for Congress’.6 For her, such measures are necessary, at least for a time, to enable politicians to get on with the job of governing without having to worry about looming elections. Likewise, Peter Orszag, the former Director of the Office of Management and Budget under the first Obama administration, has said that the political polarisation in America is now so bad that it is actually impeding ‘Washington’s ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing’.7 Writing in the New Republic, Orszag quotes John Adams as a way of reminding us that ‘there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide’. For him, what ‘may read today like an overstatement’ is actually a prescient account of the direction in which America’s democracy is headed. ‘If you need confirmation of this’, Orszag argues, one need ‘look no further than the recent debt-limit debacle, which clearly showed that we are becoming two nations governed by a single Congress – and that paralyzing gridlock is the result’. To avoid the worst of democracy we must, in his analysis, paradoxically become less democratic. The take-home lesson here is that the democratic process can quickly become moribund when subjected to prolonged periods of ‘partisan bickering’, something with which political pundits in the United States would be all too familiar. But these reasons aside, the question of why democrats are turning away from democracy in America is still little understood. New answers, deeper answers, are now needed to understand and respond to this worrying trend. As we have already seen, there is more than one way to understand why democrats turn against democracy. Yet for Taranto at least, the answer for the United States is simple and it has a lot to do with Nile Gardiner’s projection in The Telegraph newspaper: The United States is undergoing one of the biggest political revolutions in its post-war history, and perhaps the most important since Ronald Reagan, with an emphatic rejection of the idea that government knows best when it comes to handling key domestic issues, especially relating to the economy.8

These projections, as Gardiner notes, are backed by empirical data: specifically, a 2011 Gallup poll which showed that ‘49% of Americans believe the federal government has become so large and 78

the coming authoritarianism powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens’; this figure was up from 30 per cent in 2003.9 Fearing those who they have elected into power, the reasoning is that Americans may become increasingly averse to voting or certainly less likely to vote for another big government, like Obama’s. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that these projections have proved to be inaccurate. On 6 November 2012, Obama was emphatically returned to the White House for a second term as President of the United States. Despite the Democratic disaffection said to be responsible for turning voters against democracy – to say nothing of the disgust felt among many Republicans in the years between 2008 and 2012 – citizens still turned out to make their vote count. But even here, as a recent symposium dissecting the ‘US Election 2012’ acknowledged, there were clear instances ‘of the democratic process being used to subvert democracy’.10 For Steven Johnston, the most disconcerting facet of the 2012 election was not the lower than expected voter turnout or the refusal of top party representatives, Democrat and Republican alike, to really listen to the popular voice in the wake of the Occupy Movement. These alone, he notes, should have been enough to turn wavering or disillusioned voters away. But no, there was something more insidious about the 2012 election that, for him, went to the heart of America’s democratic system. ‘In addition to the problems with the campaigns and candidates,’ writes Johnston, ‘the 2012 election might have produced an illegitimate president.’ Reminiscent of the accusations levelled at George W. Bush following the 2000 Presidential election, Johnston continues, saying, The Republic Party waged a nationwide effort (one that continues) to suppress voter turnout, perhaps especially (but not exclusively) in battleground states that tend Democratic. Whether mandating state-sanctioned voter identification cards, purging official election rosters in search of so-called ineligibles, harassing and threatening voter registration efforts, or curtailing early voting periods, the GOP sought to reduce Democratic turnout to help propel Romney into the White House . . . If Romney and the Republicans had not run such an inept campaign with such a dismal candidate, these efforts might have succeeded, that is, Romney might well have stolen an election.

The net effect of this diagnosis suggests that even in America today, there are signs that democracy is working against itself. While more and more citizens are either turning away from democratic 79

democracy against itself processes or calling for wholesale political change through movements like Occupy, the nation’s chief elected representatives and political parties continue to buy votes and use (or slightly abuse) their democratic office to produce less-than-democratic outcomes. In the end, Johnston concludes, even though Obama has been returned to Office, the worry is that ‘the appearance of democracy prevails over and even helps subvert’ a less than sanguine future – a topsyturvy future in which democracy in America progressively works to manage and curtail genuine democratic action. At one level, these claims will come as a jolt to popular conceptions of American democracy and readers would be right to question their validity. This is because the portrait of contemporary American democracy just offered is fundamentally at odds with the conventional understanding of how democracy works in the United States. Certainly, few serious political commentators would want to dispute the claim that the United States is and remains the world’s leading democracy. Evidence for this assertion is widespread and emphatic. Taking the statistics generated through the Polity IV Project as just one piece of evidence, the United States clearly falls within the category of a ‘strong democracy’.11 With a ranking of +10, America is one of only a handful of countries classified as a ‘full democracy’. Under the presidency of George W. Bush, America even based a crucial tenet of its post-9/11 foreign policy around its uniquely democratic character; though the paradoxical nature of this has been highlighted by numerous commentators.12 This position continues to be upheld by the Obama administration. The reasoning continues to be that, with some adjustments to the so-called Bush doctrine, the United States can lead countries from the Middle East to Latin America in another chorus of democratisation. The American assumption – that ‘We live in a democracy universally acknowledged to be the greatest governing system in the world’ – thus remains unchallenged, as Arianna Huffington points out.13 Unfortunately, that is only one part of the story. In fact, in the very next sentence of her book How to Overthrow the Government, Huffington goes on to complicate matters, adding the comment that ‘a democracy is only as strong as it is responsive to all of its citizens’.14 When ‘[a]lmost two out of three Americans didn’t even bother to vote in the last election’ – a point she notes about the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore – Huffington’s conclusion is that no: American democracy is no longer responsive to all of its citizens.15 When ‘115 million eligible voters failed to exercise 80

the coming authoritarianism a right for which a few months later people were willing to die in East Timor, where the turnout was 98.6 percent’, then we must seriously question whether America’s democracy deserves the title of the greatest governing system in the world.16 Today, with more voters than ever forsaking poll booths or learning to use it for their own, less-than-democratic purposes, it is not unreasonable to suppose that democratic participation and processes will begin to take on a very different, even undemocratic, look in the coming decades. This is the contention which this chapter explores. Taking the claims of those like Taranto and Kulish seriously, the chapter systematically examines how contemporary American democracy is working against itself. To do this, it begins by reciting the literature on the general decline of American democracy before analysing two recent bodies of work which foretell the coming authoritarianism in the United States. These are the works by Sheldon S. Wolin and Henry A. Giroux. They are worthy of detailed exploration here because, together, they expose the inversion of American democracy and the creeping authoritarianism, not only under the presidency of George W. Bush but also, and perhaps more startlingly, under Barack Obama’s presidency. Specifically, through their at times atypical look at America’s political culture and democratic processes, both Wolin and Giroux provide us with an account of how a ‘strong’ democracy can work against itself. In this version of democracy against itself – which is distinct to those previous incarnations we have already studied – it is the continuing legacy of authoritarianism woven into and produced by American democracy that is the greatest cause for concern.

Stories of Decline: Troubling Times for American Democracy? ‘For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago,’ Joe Conason, author of It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, argues that ‘Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country.’17 Writing in the mid-2000s, at the height of George W. Bush’s second term as President of the United States, Conason’s words conveyed a sense of foreboding felt at least by some American citizens at the time. Somehow, or so the sentiment seemed to go, something had changed – particularly in the post-9/11 era. With the election and then the re-election of Bush, it seemed 81

democracy against itself that a large cross-section of Americans had ostensibly confirmed one of two things. First, that they were content to vote an authoritarian administration into power, not once but twice. In this way, unlike their President, the public failed to heed the ‘old Tennessee adage’: ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.’ But the citizens, as Conason puts it, also confirmed something else: their willingness to live ‘in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment’.18 As the American-led War on Terror wore on, with the fight being taken to terrorists in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans at home were also prepared to make sacrifices. Ceding their own democratic rights and freedoms to an administration that progressively rationalised its executive overreaching in the name of security and democracy, the majority of American citizens, knowingly or not, participated (or were at least implicit) in the erosion of democratic ways and practices. We will return to Conason’s analysis of the authoritarian peril at a later stage when we document the full extent of democratic infringements enacted during the Bush years. For now, though, it is enough to refer to these events as a starting point for a broader account of the decline that has attended democracy in America during the last several decades. Though Conason might want to focus solely on the period of 2000 to 2008, thinking that the authoritarian urge exists predominantly within these years, the issues and problems he raises are not actually unique to the Bush era. That Conason’s argument is not limited solely to the Bush presidency is evident enough if we take a brief look at some of the noticeable trends and decisions which have animated twentieth-century American democratic politics. Two general trends in particular merit our attention. The first has been raised by Jeffrey Isaac in his 1998 book Democracy in Dark Times. Projecting that liberal democracy is not likely to triumph unimpeded in the post-Cold War period, Isaac boils down the many challenges faced by democracy to two developments: socio-­economic inequality and the ineptness of democratic institutions which, together, have weakened democracies in even the most advanced liberal democratic societies. Specifically, he argues that in an age when democracy and neo-liberal economics have become largely synonymous, it is very difficult for democracy to extricate itself from the production of inequitable and even undemocratic 82

the coming authoritarianism outcomes. In the face of these injustices, democratic processes created to give back to the people some sort of control have become largely unresponsive. And this is the case not just in newly emerging democracies. It is a predicament that pockmarks so-called strong democracies like the United States as well. Already in this chapter we have talked about the decreasing number of citizens who believe that voting will actually do anything to redress the economic, social and political crises that confront them. Those most in need of help remain either unheard by Washington power-brokers or subjected to the government’s lengthy bureaucratic red tape. For Isaac, the reality is that democracy is now synonymous with ‘Governmental gridlock. Ineffective public policy. Declining faith in political institutions. A growing appeal of right-wing populism and antiliberal sentiments.’19 Indeed, as he continues, though democracy ‘claims to stand for equality before the law, it permits and indeed promotes extensive and dramatic social and economic inequalities’.20 The problem as he sees it is that even as democracy ‘claims to embody the will of the people, it lacks channels of healthy civic participation, and thus tends to promote . . . political alienation and resentment’. The result may not end in fascism or totalitarianism. But it is equally unlikely to culminate in democracy either. There is also a second trend. Drawn out by Paul Smith, it suggests that ‘the United States has entered a period that might properly be called authoritarian’.21 Though Smith does not himself hold the view that American politics comes anywhere close to being ‘fascist’, he does refer to Hannah Arendt’s definition of authoritarianism in drawing connections between America and Weimar Germany. As he notes, authoritarianism is, among other things, a product of two conditions: one, the bourgeoisie’s abandonment of the political realm and the rise of demagogues and, two, the collapse of the class structure. For Smith, while class divisions have actually intensified in the economic sphere, making things less equitable, it is true that, politically speaking, there now is an illusion in America that class is no longer a relevant distinction to draw. There has been a steady ‘ideological effort’, in Smith’s words, ‘to eradicate class consciousness from the political realm . . . such that at the levels of both political and civic life, the kind of conditions that Arendt points to are replicated’.22 In terms of the bourgeoisie’s abandonment of the political realm and the rise of demagogues in America, Smith says that the ‘primitive ideological appeals of right-wing radio shows and evangelical Christianity, on the one side, and ruggedly doctrinaire 83

democracy against itself speech and action by the political class on the other, both heighten the sense of authoritarianism’.23 In all, the base appeals to extremist positions, both on the political Left and Right, have increasingly rendered American democracy without a workable centre, meaning it is more likely to go off the rails in either extreme. Drawn together and what is clear is that longer-term trends have been moving America’s democracy ever closer to something that resembles authoritarianism – even if it is distinct from authoritarianism as such. Responsibility for this state of affairs is spread. Citizens, elected leaders and powerful lobbyists and corporate elites have all eviscerated democracy in their own ways. For instance, influential lobby groups and corporate interests have progressively appropriated the democratic machinery so that it is now less a public good than an instrument wielded by an unelected minority. Media ownership and news content, another lynchpin of democracy, has for some time been dictated by private industry prejudices. And as for the constellation of everyday citizens, the supposed centrepiece of democracy, there seems to be an unstated consensus that voting once every four years is somehow doing enough. Today, as commenters like to point out, it is true that democracy still favours all, but to what extent that all are favoured equally is quite another matter. Paul Bigioni has argued that successive governments in North America have for decades been privileging their relationship with big business over all others. Writing in a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives publication, he notes that: Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: the vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and US governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the last 25 years.24

The eerie thing about Bigioni’s assessment is that what is taking shape in North America now is not without precedent. If we look back into the twentieth century, Bigioni claims that there is more than a passing resemblance between contemporary America and the events which inspired the rise of fascism in democratic countries like Germany and Italy. Then, as now, corporate culture, moneyed ­interests and unelected figures infiltrated the democratic process and, by so doing, squeezed out the popular voice. As economic power, typically the preserve of the few, entered into the political fray, dem84

the coming authoritarianism ocratic principles and practices slowly found themselves weakened and inverted. In Germany and Italy, argues Bigioni, this happened when big business was permitted by government to influence government, to the point where the ‘political power of big business fuelled and gave rise to fascism’ in these countries.25 In the United States, the situation may not be so grim. Yet neither is it a perfect picture of health. ‘American politics is broken’ is Huffington’s extraordinary claim: ‘under the thumb of a small corporate elite using its financial clout to control both parties’ political agendas’, the ‘founding principle of “one man, one vote” has been replaced by the new math of special interests: thousands of lobbyists plus multimillions of dollars equal access and influence out of the reach of ordinary citizens’.26 As special lobby groups grow, backed by and backing moneyed interests, everyday citizens are less able to find an equal footing on which to challenge government. It should surprise no one that, in advanced democracies, the wealthy are more politically empowered than those who possess little material wealth.27 Democratic franchise has become so blotted that it is not citizenry participation – beyond their limited participation during elections – that is encouraged by government. Rather, ‘as voting and face-to-face politics give way to a campaign-finance plutocracy’, Robert Kuttner deems that the ascendancy of donor democracy has to be considered one of the main ‘ticking time bombs’ for American democracy.28 The disconcerting thing about all this, as the likes of Noam Chomsky have highlighted for some time, is that nothing just described is actually illegal or beyond what democratic processes permit and necessitate.29 Campaign finance and political donations, deleterious as they may seem to some, are fundamental to America’s democratic system – so much so that without them, most political candidates would simply be incapable of running for office. They would not be able to afford to participate in democracy. Just take the 2012 presidential election as a recent example of the cost associated with campaigning. In all, it is believed that the Obama campaign raised just over one billion dollars, spending $985 million of that, while the Romney campaign spent almost all of the $992 million it raised through campaign finance.30 Put together, two billion dollars is what it cost these two candidates to run a national election – a price far too high without corporate backing. Unsurprisingly, at the top of the donor list for both candidates were a group of wealthy corporations and private citizens whose donations 85

democracy against itself ensured their candidate possessed a war chest large enough to wage electoral battle. Through these donations, otherwise unelected individuals, and their minority interests, began to curry favour among popularly elected representatives. This is how corporations and their stakeholders can legitimately shape politics in a democracy: by buying influence and indirectly managing the candidates they helped prop up.31 This is how they can covertly affect national policy and hold presidents to account like no average citizen can ever hope to do. The long and short of it, at least according to Jason West, is this: ‘Our present political system has set itself up as a for-profit enterprise: corporations purchase candidates from both major parties as a business investment.’32 This situation is made even worse when the collusion of the news and entertainment industry is taken into account. As Matt Guardino and Dean Synder document in a recent study, ‘for-profit media corporations’ have for decades been driven by a market logic seeking to replace independent and critical news broadcasting with news entertainment and partisan reporting. For them, such ‘policy changes have profoundly impacted the operation of the news media as a site for political information and democratic debate’.33 Decisions about what to broadcast and how to broadcast it are now dictated less by the news event itself than by corporate executives and benefactors who – in many instances – are beholden to other corporate or political interests. One news network Guardino and Synder cite to exemplify this point is Fox, a station known from its association with the American political Right. As they demonstrate in their analysis, Fox consistently represents Right-wing political issues and events, such as the Tea Party movement, in a favourable light. However, when it comes to social democratic concerns, like the recently mooted initiatives to increase the welfare state in America, Fox is characteristically one-sided in its condemnation. Referring particularly to social democracies in Europe, Guardino and Synder write that Fox has a habit of portraying social democracy ‘as an alien social order, akin to the strong-state, authoritarian communism of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China’.34 In this way, it is clear that Fox has a vested interest in keeping America ‘American’ and democracy from achieving its radical, progressive potential. There is much here which vindicates the sentiment that democracy is being undermined in a uniquely democratic fashion. Again to cite Chomsky: though ‘Americans may be encouraged to vote’, they are increasingly discouraged ‘to participate more meaningfully in the 86

the coming authoritarianism political arena’, he says.35 The citizen body has come to think of democracy as a once-in-every-four-years event, limited only to their vote on election day (if that). During all other times, democracy is the business of elected politicians and the private benefactors they serve. Privately owned and politically partisan news networks labour to keep the people informed while, at the same time, ensuring that their understanding remains predisposed to certain political outlooks. And it is not just scholars who now see democracy working against itself in the United States. Even popular culture has tapped into the sentiment that democrats can use democracy in ways that are ultimately antithetical to its long-term vitality. A good recent illustration of this is the Netflix television series, House of Cards. Adapted from the British series of the same name, the American incarnation stars Kevin Spacey as House Majority Whip, Francis Underwood. From the very first episode, Underwood is portrayed as a calculating and shadowy figure who seems willing to do almost anything to secure power and punish those who get in his way. In public, Underwood, a Democrat, is a respected public figure and capable politician. But behind closed doors, as a Lexington column in The Economist makes clear, Underwood and other elected representatives are anything but. They ‘are shown lying, leaking secrets to lobbyists, framing rivals, indulging in fistfights (one in front of wide-eyed children) and snorting cocaine, as well as sleeping with prostitutes, their own staff and a story-hungry reporter’.36 Disengaged political representatives, the centrality of corporate and lobby interests, the private ownership of news media, and a public largely left behind are the taglines of this American fairy tale. Of course, the veracity of these fictional portrayals when compared to what happens in reality has been disputed. While some, like Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, have argued that House of Cards is ‘not very realistic’, even if it is ‘highly entertaining fiction’, others, like Republican Jeff Duncan, believe that Underwood-like figures do exist and flourish in DC. The series’ depiction of him, as Duncan puts it, is certainly ‘an accurate portrayal’.37 Yet minute details aside, there is a deeper disparity between fiction and fact in House of Cards, one that the Lexington review rightly spotlights. Unlike the British parliamentary system of the 1990s on which the original series was based, Lexington makes the point that in America today even the ‘most brutal American whip, Speaker or president has never had the near-tyrannical powers of a leader of the majority party in Britain’s parliamentary system. Present-day American leaders have still less 87

democracy against itself control over their troops.’38 To that extent, the supposed capacity of Underwood – or any elected official in reality – to will things into being is overdrawn and fictitious. Perhaps once, a long time ago, politicians may have had the ability or courage to take charge and move the country forward – for good or ill. Nowadays, unfortunately, that no longer seems possible. Politicians wanting to go it their own way must first fight against the interests of mighty corporations and private donors whose money enabled them to win office in the first place; a Sisyphean task. The needs of the average voter, and what has been promised to them, must become a distant second concern. And so the real danger is less that an Underwood-esque figure might steal power from the people illegitimately or at least so blatantly. Rather, as Lexington notes, what is more likely to occur, given the state of Washington, is that democracy will increasingly be ‘haunted by a guilty dread of voters, and of the populists who successfully channel the public’s anger, fear and disappointment’.39 When this occurs, frustration and disaffection will in equal measure fuel ‘tea-party and anti-government groups that drag the Republican Party to simplistic solutions on the right’, while leaving Obama and the Democratic Party with no option than to ‘pander’ and make only the most ‘modest adjustments’ to national policy – a trend we saw occurring in the context of the gun control legislation debate postSandy Hook.40 Any way we choose to look at this scenario, what we come up against is a conclusion not entirely dissimilar to that drawn, some thirty years ago, by Bertram Gross. Writing in his now classic work Friendly Fascism, Gross said that: ‘Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across the face of America.’41 This may sound a startling projection to us in 2014. However, when what he says is unpacked a little further, it is not all that difficult to agree with the sum of what he had to say. That is because, for him, the type of despotism likely in America will barely resemble the old fascist regimes of Germany and Italy. Those on the lookout only for ‘black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback’ will be looking for quite some time, according to Gross.42 For even if the odd extremist faction does surface in America, they will only form one part of a much larger equation – as what sets friendly fascism apart is not its intent to revolt against the system outright. To the contrary, friendly fascism will be best characterised by its subtlety and its ability to adapt to the existing regime, that is, to democracy. 88

the coming authoritarianism Nothing about this fascism will trigger alarm bells unless we shift attention to the trends and developments which this chapter has sought to outline. It is as we do so that we will likely see a set of two interconnected moves taking place within American society. On the one hand, as Gross pointed out, we will begin to realise that more democracy will not necessarily lead to a better or stronger democracy in America. Rather, as illogical as this may sound, it can be the case that more democracy can actually be harmful to democracy, especially when the ‘democratic machinery’ is being used by citizens, politicians and lobbyists in ways that ultimately undermine the ‘counterbalancing of power’.43 It is thus entirely possible, if not easily perceptible, for democracy to be implicated in its own downfall. Referring to William L. Shirer, Gross surmises ‘that America may be the first country in which fascism comes to power through democratic elections’.44 What he means by this is that given how accommodating the American democratic system is, it can be ‘used in many entirely different – even contradictory – ways’.45 Democracy can just as easily be used by those in tea-party and anti-government groups to achieve their ends as it can be by disgruntled citizen groups and corporate elites who have fought and donated their way into positions of power. This leads to the second move apparent in Gross’ thesis: one which sees democracy colluding with Big Businesses headed by oligarchic executives seeking unrivalled access to the nation’s elected representatives and chief decision-makers. But far from calling for the overt suspension of democracy and the elimination of competitive elections, something that would hardly benefit these friendly fascists, this second move sees the existing ‘two party plus’ system retained. Democracy will remain the only game in town. The only catch being that power will be progressively ceded from the citizen and the elected representative to unelected oligarchs.46 For this reason, the most likely scenario is that friendly fascism will be brought to bear not by extremists working outside the parameters of democracy to bring about its annihilation. Quite the opposite. Friendly fascism will be the product of those whose actions emanate from within and ultimately reinforce the Establishment. The making of a new, more American democracy is the goal here – even if it is a democracy that will in the end be less radical, less progressive and less democratic.

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democracy against itself

Inverted Totalitarianism, Managed Democracy and the Coming Authoritarianism: The State of America’s Democracy According to Sheldon Wolin and Henry Giroux Read in isolation, it is easy to dismiss Gross’ writings as the iconoclastic prognosis of a man made unduly pessimistic by the developments of his time. Nothing more than one man’s attempt to come to terms with the political shifts of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gross’ Friendly Fascism thus shares certain parallels with another iconic work which too projected a despotic political future: George Orwell’s 1984. Like Orwell’s novel, Gross’ volume tapped into the mood of the day and was a work of political speculation; a projection of what the future might look like based on conditions already extant in the present. Both works, in their own ways, saw their present as a blueprint of a future where power would be abstracted and withheld from a people who do not seem to know any better. But there is a crucial difference that distinguishes Gross’ work from Orwell’s. Unlike 1984 – which was a work of fiction at the time and has, at best, become a case of life imitating art – Friendly Fascism’s future has neither proved imagined nor metaphoric. It is literal. Indeed, flash forward two decades, to the year 2000, and there began an episode when the friendly fascists Gross wrote about in 1980 descended on Washington in earnest to remake American democracy. Returning now to Conason’s point, the label most fitting of the Republican administration which took power in 2000 is authoritarianism. Though Conason may be less convinced that there was anything actually friendly about the administration of George W. Bush, his analysis shares stark similarities with what Gross described. In Bush, according to Conason, we had a figure who found reason to increase his own executive powers. Owing to the unprecedented attacks that occurred on American soil on 11 September 2001, power began to begat more power. It is startling how quickly Bush – a president of a democratic country with clear democratic checks and balances in place – was able to jettison key democratic rights and processes in the United States. Democratic cornerstones such as the separation of powers, the free flow of information, freedom of speech and association, and Habeas corpus found themselves superseded by national security concerns.47 Against a backdrop of threat and uncertainty, important national decisions, including decisions about whether and why to wage war, began to be made behind closed doors. Acts of intimidation and directives to 90

the coming authoritarianism torture became commonplace; coming as a reminder to America’s enemies and dissidents of just what the Bush administration was willing to do to secure the state. But the plights confronting democracy, for Conason, did not stop here. As he writes, ‘[o]ver the past decade, the Republican ascendency has been accompanied by the rise of a corporate political cadre tied more closely than ever to the White House and the congressional leadership’.48 Bush, not dissimilar to Gross’ friendly fascists, was inextricably beholden to moneyed interests, both empowered and interned by them. In Conason’s analysis, this was the entrenched ‘corporate-statist’ relationship that existed between the Republican leadership and corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, ExxonMobil, the National Coal Council and General Electric. That this relationship existed – and in some cases still exists – should have made us all very uneasy. It should have made us question whether, and to what extent, governmental policies under Bush reflected the interests of a small minority of corporate executives over the wishes of the ordinary citizen. The natural reaction that people tend to have when they hear this version of events is to blame only the administration and its squad of faceless political and corporate benefactors. And that is, of course, an understandable reaction. After all, it is true that the American public did little more than vote this Republican administration into power on this account. It was not the citizens who were directly responsible for the decisions that the administration made while in power. Yet that is only one part of the story. There is also a second conclusion to draw, one which does not exempt the citizenry from culpability for what took place between 2000 and 2008. This is something which Smith makes abundantly clear in his analysis. Having deferred to Arendt’s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism to set out the authoritarian trend in the United States, he concedes that ‘it should be no surprise that Americans have given themselves over to such new controls and to the straitening of their much-vaunted liberties’ – not once, but twice. The first time that Americans gave themselves over to these new controls was in 2000, when they elected Bush to power. This was perhaps forgivable. However, in 2004, they repeated their mistake when they collectively chose to re-elect Bush despite all that had occurred during his first term.49 Deferring this time to Alexis de Tocqueville’s study in Democracy in America, Smith observes that citizens in America have the propensity to ‘vote first’ before acquiescing to the ‘“tutelary” power of government’.50 This seems to be a 91

democracy against itself characteristic trait of democracy. Freedom, mixed with an unhealthy dose of apathy and dependency, produces an authoritarian urge, leading citizens to submit willingly to conditions of unfreedom. For Marc Hetherington and Elizabeth Suhay, this inclination only becomes heightened when citizens perceive increased levels of threat – which is exactly what many Americans felt in the post-9/11 years.51 But this sentiment is not just held by individuals already sceptical of democracy. Based on the findings of their study, they argue that most citizens in America will not likely question a suspension of democratic rights under certain circumstances. Indeed, ‘[o]ne need only consider the near majority (and sometimes clear majority) support for controversial elements of the war on terror, such as warrantless wiretapping and preemptive war, to surmise that “authoritarian” preferences are not always fringe positions’.52 Vindicating the point that it was not just the Bush administration that undermined democracy in the years immediately trailing 9/11, this shows that there are occasions and situations when otherwise committed democrats might be willing to vote for initiatives and politicians with less-than-savoury democratic credentials. ‘When ordinary people perceive a grave threat to their safety’, as Hetherington and Suhay conclude, they will not be shy about ‘adopting antidemocratic preferences’.53 This is irrespective of whether they identify themselves as being particularly susceptible to authoritarian preferences. In the heat of the moment, when a perceived threat hovers over the nation, democratic systems are as vulnerable to anti-democratic trends as any other system of governance. Even if these measures are put in place to safeguard the nation and to safeguard democracy in the long term, the procedural aspects will still have been sacrificed in the meantime. In what is left of this chapter, we will examine two contemporary positions that theorise for us the capacity American democracy has to produce characteristics antithetical to its own survival. The first theoretical position comes from Sheldon S. Wolin, particularly the thesis he spelled out in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Published in 2008, the text is already considered a classic take on where American democracy is headed. Written during the years of the presidency of George W. Bush, largely as a denunciation of the direction his administration was taking the country in, Wolin’s work is important because it details the peculiar inversion of democratic practices and procedures in America. In other words, Wolin’s work provides us with a contemporary American example of democracy against itself. 92

the coming authoritarianism But astute as Democracy Incorporated is, the book is not without its limitations. For those who do not associate themselves with the radical Left, this may be an understatement. Yet even for those willing to read the book on its own terms, there are still criticisms to make. The key one, for example, is that Wolin’s thesis is too heavily directed at and dependent on the Bush presidency. That is to say, much of Wolin’s critiques of American democracy are actually critiques of the Bush administration and, more broadly, the War on Terror. Of course, there are clear exceptions. Wolin does, for instance, situate his thesis against a broader historical account of democracies which have destroyed themselves just as he painstakingly documents changes in American politics which have been mainstays since Gross’ day. Despite this, Democracy Incorporated remains a product of its time. And for some at least this meant that with the election of Barack Obama, a candidate who promised so much and seemed so different to Bush, everything should have reverted back to normal. Democracy’s inversion should be undone as soon as the friendly fascists left town. Henry A. Giroux, the second theorist we will examine, comes into the fray to remind us that this has not been the case. He rescues Wolin’s thesis, reminding us that what Wolin wrote of, though temporally limited in one sense, is neither confined to one presidency nor to one decade in American history. The sum of Giroux’s writings on American democracy links the deleterious effects that the Bush presidency had on democratic practices with the persistent legacy of authoritarianism in American politics more broadly; a legacy which, Giroux warns us, continues to be reproduced, albeit more subtly, by the presidency of Barack Obama. Sheldon Wolin and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism Democracy Incorporated was published at a momentous juncture in American politics: during the year that George W. Bush stepped down as the 43rd President of the United States. Yet 2008 was not actually the first time Wolin wrote about the phenomenon he came to call inverted totalitarianism. Appearing in a 2003 edition of The Nation magazine, Wolin’s article ‘Inverted Totalitarianism’ warned the American public of a dangerous change that was taking shape in plain sight. But occupied as they were at the time by events unravelling in Iraq, Americans were too focused on foreign democratic 93

democracy against itself problems to notice what was happening to democracy at home. Most worryingly, as Wolin saw it, were the changes to the ambit of state power and the corresponding inability of democratic checks and balances to counteract them.54 Here was a case where state authoritarianism was won without technically breaching any democratic principles in the process. Set against the background of an illegitimate foreign war and a looming presidential election in the United States, his article pointed to a unique moment, a turning point, in democratic politics. This is how he explained things then: The Republicans have emerged as a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority. As Republicans have become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism and footnote the end of ideology. In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home.55

But as startling as this was to Wolin, his lament was that none of it actually seemed all that shocking or irregular in the context of things. After all, ‘democracy’ continued to remain the Bush administration’s buzzword, even as it sought to delimit activities previously encompassed under the realm of democratic politics. Moreover, incessant talk of free and fair elections, not just in the United States but also in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, made it very difficult to detect any noticeable erosion of democracy. Still, just beneath this discourse, Wolin believed a dangerous shift was happening: one where key constitutional guarantees were being eroded by corporate-statist interests and an apathetic citizenry. This was the inversion that Wolin hoped to expose. Specifically, in coining the term inverted totalitarianism, his goal was to document aspects of democracy that were being used against itself in novel and threatening ways. To this end, Wolin claimed that understanding inverted totalitarianism was really about understanding how the official institutions and forums of democracy were no longer democratic at all. In all but name, these mainstays of ­democratic activity had long ago become privileged sites, where power and wealth are prerequisites for entry. This was the key to comprehending inverted totalitarianism. For him, citizens needed to grasp how corporate power and its culture of corporatism had infiltrated the democratic sphere. They needed to realise how, in the 94

the coming authoritarianism United States, the latter could not now exist without the former. Strong and democratic on the outside yet weak and anti-democratic at its heart – this was the spectre of inverted totalitarianism Wolin had diagnosed in democracy in America. Given this, the emergence of inverted totalitarianism in America must, in Wolin’s words, be seen as ‘nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century’.56 Writing this time in a 2003 Newsday column, Wolin reminded Americans that they were ‘facing a grim situation with no easy solution’.57 Citing the recently passed anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he bid readers to remember that ‘whenever any form of Government becomes destructive’, including the present incarnation of democracy in the United States, ‘it must be challenged’. This was how Wolin began charting the move from democracy toward inverted totalitarianism in America. But he quickly realised that for a phenomenon so little understood, that ran counterintuitive to most American intuitions, more work was required to define inverted totalitarianism and signpost its emergence in American politics. This was an important task as there was nothing about inverted totalitarianism which mirrored traditional totalitarian regimes. There was nothing so overt as the pogroms, black shirts, evangelical leaders and mass rallies which precipitated past totalitarian upsurges. Appearing early on in the preface to Democracy Incorporated, Wolin quickly makes this clear, saying that inverted totalitarianism is not fuelled by revolutionary movements seeking to monopolise state power overtly. Unlike past totalitarian regimes, inverted totalitarianism is characterised more as a ‘political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry’.58 Emphasising ‘political’ twice in one sentence is Wolin’s way of saying that ‘the political’ in American democracy has shifted in focus away from citizenry action to corporate control. Clearly, there are visible signs of this shift. Yet none of them actually rings alarm bells in the democratic sphere. And that is Wolin’s worry. They may, as some people assume, be seen as the unpleasant consequence of neo-liberal economics. And that is a fair enough assumption to make, even if it is slightly mistaken. For Wolin, neo-liberalism is important, but even more important is the changing nature of American democracy itself which has assumed many of the governance structures and practices driving neo-liberal corporatism in the economic sphere. The best way to describe what is happening is through the analogy 95

democracy against itself of a symbiotic relationship: where ‘traditional government’, on the one hand, and ‘the system of “private” governance represented by the modern business corporation’, on the other hand, morph into one seamless system of political governance.59 Driven by an abstract entity that is comparable to the corporate head, inverted totalitarianism depoliticises the citizenry and ‘professes to be the opposite of what, in fact, it is’: a new if softer form of totalitarianism.60 The point of inverted totalitarianism is to ‘manage democracy’: to rationalise social problems, concentrate wealth and political power in the hands of a small minority and placate an increasingly passive citizenry. Now, before continuing, it needs to be reiterated that Wolin is not an objective observer of American politics as much as a proponent of the radical Left. As mentor to some of America’s leading thinkers on the political Left, he has made a name for himself advocating radical democracy based on a participatory ethos. As he put it in an earlier article, ‘democracy is a project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them’.61 In this way, democracy is not just ‘a form of government’, a crucial point lost on many democrats today.62 Any move to institutionalise democracy, to safeguard it with a constitution, is actually contrary to the spirit of democracy. Instead, Wolin believed that ‘[c]onstitutional democracy is democracy fitted to a constitution. It is not democratic or democratized constitutionalism because it is a democracy without the demos as actor.’63 Institutionalisation and constitutionalism are not ways to improve democracy; for Wolin, they are chains fitted to democratic action, working ultimately to limit what can be done and said in a democracy. Responding to his own question – ‘What causes a democracy to change into some non- or anti-democratic system, and what kind of system is democracy likely to change into?’ – Wolin’s conception of inverted totalitarianism is the latest corollary of what occurs when democracy is fitted with chains that turn it into little else than a form of government. That said, it is important to emphasise that he does not equate America’s democratic system and the Bush administration with Nazi Germany and the dictatorship of Hitler. ‘My main point’, this coming from Wolin, ‘will not be that the Bush administration was a facsimile of the Nazi dictatorship, or that the unremarkable George W. Bush resembled the charismatic Fuhrer, or that his supporters were Naziphiles who dreamed of a racist nation 96

the coming authoritarianism of goose-steppers.’64 Whereas traditional totalitarianism is typically triggered by the collapse of what can conventionally be labelled as a ‘weak democracy’ – a point which we can dispute given the context of the claims made in the previous chapters – Wolin argues that in an ostensibly ‘strong democracy’ like the United States, another form of totalitarianism is expected. And unlike its traditional counterpart, where the destruction of democracy is capped off with a total and violent revolution that sweeps a fundamentally different system of government into power, this newer form of totalitarianism will barely look any different to the democracy from which it emerged. As Wolin continues, America’s ‘inverted totalitarianism has emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation’s political traditions’.65 Inverted totalitarianism is the fruit of a strong democracy. It has its foundation in a democracy and, because of this, it ‘allows free speech, venerates the Constitution, and operates within a two-party system that, theoretically, secures a role for an opposition party’.66 Far from trying to unseat democracy, its goal is to refine and restore it to its former glory. But to do this it must ironically resort to non-democratic resources. It must, to cite Dick Howard, guard against majority rule because ‘the majority has the right to do wrong’ in a democracy.67 Here, the writings of the French social critic Jacques Rancière are also instructive and help to accentuate Wolin’s point. As Rancière writes: Democratic government . . . is bad when it is allowed to be corrupted by democratic society, which wants for everyone to be equal and for all differences to be respected. It is good, on the other hand, when it rallies individuals enfeebled by democratic society to the vitality of war in order to defend the values of civilization, the values pertaining to the clash of civilizations. The thesis of the new hatred of democracy can be succinctly put: there is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization.68

In order to rescue democracy from its rampant liberalism, its equality for equality’s sake bias, its lack of direction and its ‘anything goes’ mentality, the sum of which have led it astray and under-prepared it for a hostile world, democracy must be managed to harness its unique strengths and jettison all that weakens it. Do not therefore mistake inverted totalitarianism as the denunciation of democracy. To the contrary, all it proposes it proposes for the sake of democracy. In this sense, Rancière’s term the ‘hatred of democracy’ only 97

democracy against itself applies to a particular understanding of democracy. It does not apply to a democracy ‘capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life’.69 This is the democracy that inverted totalitarianism champions and it is the longevity of the former that the resources of the latter are directed to securing. In this way, under conditions of inverted totalitarianism democratic conventions will remain true to their founding principles even if they have, by necessity, been adapted to the changing global environment. Initially prompted by the events of 9/11, according to Wolin, the Bush administration did precisely that: inverted democracy in the service of its own political and strategic objectives. Citizens, in turn, began to fear what the state might do, despite what it said it would not, for the sake of safeguarding its survival and destroying its enemies. Because of this, the country’s leaders came to share the belief that: the world can be changed to accord with a limited range of objectives, such as ensuring that its own energy needs will be met, that ‘free marks’ will be established, that military supremacy will be maintained, and that ‘friendly regimes’ will be in place in those parts of the world considered vital to its own security and economic needs.70

To achieve these objectives, democratic politics had to be systematised. Elections had to be better managed and dissidents subtly dissuaded. The logic at work here is both complex and paradoxical. As its name suggests, ‘managed democracy’ simultaneously trumpets democracy while working to undercut excessive freedoms and dissent. It advances democracy’s reach while at the same time setting up invisible glass ceilings that restrict it from going too far. Under inverted totalitarianism, in other words, democracy has been installed with an internal fail-safe that prevents it from ever becoming too democratic. In the United States, Wolin argues that this has occurred not by eradicating formal opposition as such. Formally, the democratic system continues to be lauded and retained. Rather, the management of democracy takes place through a range of ­insidious state-sanctioned economic incentives that prevents those with the power to affect change from actually wanting it. It takes place through concentrating wealth and power while enabling the public to think that they remain in control and politically active. Yet when the hierarchical corporate structure imbues democratic politics, and denies all but the rich and well-connected access to the cor98

the coming authoritarianism ridors of power, Wolin has cause to be doubtful. When citizens are fed on dribs and drabs of information from partisan media sources and thwarted from formal democratic participation outside of highly controlled election spectacles, the question that needs to be asked is whether America’s democracy really remains democratic or whether it has morphed into something else altogether. Henry Giroux and America’s New Authoritarianism Wolin’s thesis about inverted totalitarianism is novel in many ways. Yet what it does not do, or do sufficiently, is extend its diagnosis beyond the Bush presidency. There is much in the pages of Democracy Incorporated that reads entirely as an indictment of American politics during the years 2000 to 2008. This, after all, was the period when Wolin penned this work, a work which was inspired in large part by the unprecedented shifts that attended democracy in the United States after 9/11. While Wolin does painstakingly situate these novel developments against a longer history of authoritarianism in America, Democracy Incorporated is fundamentally a critique directed at the politics inspired by the Bush administration. For critics of his work, the question thus becomes: has Wolin’s system of inverted totalitarianism been nullified by the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States? On the face of it, one would have to say yes. Both as a man and as a political figure, there is very little about Obama that is comparable to Bush. With the catchcry of ‘change’ that swept him into power in 2008, Obama promised a different politics and a different democracy than what had flourished under his predecessor’s rule. Acknowledging this, Wolin conceded in the preface to the new paperback edition of Democracy Incorporated that developments since 2008 have seemed to undermine his thesis about inverted totalitarianism in America.71 But as he goes on to explain, this may be too hasty a conclusion to draw. For despite coming to office promising genuine change, Wolin believes that Obama has not as president produced a ‘paradigmatic’ transformation of America’s political direction. Rather, all he has managed to do is mitigate some of the worst political policies institutionalised by the Bush administration. Far from revolting against the system of inverted totalitarianism, the Obama administration has really only sought a return to the political status quo. Even though ‘“the audacity of hope” which Obama wrote about in his autobiography certainly has been fulfilled by the 99

democracy against itself fact of his own election,’ for Wolin, ‘that audacity does not appear to challenge the system of power which has brought the nation an endless war, bankruptcy, recession, and high unemployment’.72 The current pulling democracy toward the shores of inverted totalitarianism has slowed but certainly not stopped. It is clear from this that Wolin has corrected the backward glance of Democracy Incorporated. Even so, a short preface of a few pages is the extent of his analysis of the continuing legacies of the political system he calls inverted totalitarianism in the wake of Obama’s election. Of itself, it is not enough to convince sceptics that democracy in the United States remains in a precarious position despite the change in direction. And because of this, they would be justified to query the continuing veracity of Wolin’s case. This is where the works of Henry Giroux become particularly useful. Like Wolin, Giroux has amassed a large and impressive body of work, ranging from topics on media and cultural studies to critical pedagogy, youth studies and political theory. Yet as a political theorist, it has been his ideas about radical democratic configurations which have stood out the most. In a fashion not dissimilar to Wolin, Giroux believes that what is happening in America has a longer historical heritage. He argues that the net effect of the democracy’s infusion with practices stemming from ‘free-market fundamentalism and an escalating militarism’ has left social values and public institutions in tatters.73 Writing in 2006, he pointed out that America’s foreign and domestic policies have exposed for some time a ‘growing authoritarianism in American life’.74 Like commentators already discussed in this chapter, the tenor of Giroux’s attacks is commonplace. Citing the growing unilateralism and corruption exhibited in American democracy, he argues that authoritarian grabs at power have become second nature to many of the nation’s elected leaders. It is tolerated and seen as synonymous with democratic politics. This was particularly so for key members of the Bush administration. By playing on the public’s fears in the wake of a terror attack, the President and his closest advisors extended their executive powers and, in doing so, undermined crucial democratic guarantees, such as due process, electoral integrity and ­political pluralism.75 For Giroux, fascism thus remains a relevant apparatus for understanding contemporary America since it essentially doubles as a ‘signpost’ for the subversion of democracy.76 For those willing to examine objectively what occurred between 2000 and 2008, there 100

the coming authoritarianism can be little doubt that these signposts were present and that they marked out the fascist threat to democracy on more than one occasion; culminating ultimately with Bush’s re-election in 2004. This one event – which was the product of a collective and democratic decision made by the majority of America’s citizens – signalled, for Giroux, ‘a country that is moving rapidly toward a form of authoritarianism that undermines any claim to being a liberal democracy’.77 To be sure, America is not comparable to Nazi Germany, a point which Giroux, like Wolin, emphasises. Nonetheless, there were still a number of fascist signposts which pockmarked the Bush administration’s tenure, signposts which also blemished Weimar Germany’s democracy prior to its eventual collapse. But what really separates Giroux as a scholar of America’s democratic decline from all the analysts who have come before him is that he does not believe the authoritarian threat in America ceased to exist with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Rather, as his writings go on to detail, the movement toward authoritarianism continues unabated under the Democratic leadership of Obama. While others couch this sentiment in subtle language, or position it as an afterthought, Giroux is unambiguous and unrelenting. Most articulately presented in ‘Barack Obama and the Resurgent Specter of Authoritarianism’, a 2011 JAC essay, Giroux argues that there are two common misconceptions about authoritarianism in America that need dispelling.78 The first is that, contrary to popular belief, authoritarianism is not actually ‘alien to the political landscape’.79 The view that authoritarianism is what occurs ‘elsewhere’ – not in the United States, in other words – is inaccurate and dangerous. The second misconception, according to Giroux, relates to the belief that the movement toward authoritarianism experienced under the Bush administration, in particular during the second term, was exaggerated. Not only that, but the now commonly held view is that these developments must be considered the exception and not the norm. They were events and decisions spurred on by an unprecedented act of aggression by a group of Islamic fundamentalists against the American way of life. Both these views, argues Giroux, are problematic when examined against the chain of events which has followed in the wake of Obama’s ascendancy to power. Though outwardly less authoritarian, there are a number of anti-democratic trends which remain central in Obama’s America; practices and views held by both members of his administration and by the broader public as well. Working within the confines made 101

democracy against itself available to them through the democratic machinery, the people could be said to have endorsed a leader who, despite his promise to change politics for the better, ended up replicating a number of the anti-democratic policies espoused by his predecessor. As Giroux’s analysis shows, by 2011 the Obama administration had already endorsed the use of military commissions, argued for the use of indefinite detention with no charges or legal recourse for Afghan prisoners, extended the USA PATRIOT Act, continued two wars while expanding the war in Afghanistan, and largely reproduced Bush’s market-driven approach to school reform.80

Further to these policies, Obama decided to bail out Wall Street, which, for Giroux, had to be done at the expense of the 26.3 million Americans who were unemployed and struggling to make ends meet at the time. In this way, protecting the wealth and power of a select minority, to the detriment of an underprivileged majority, has become something of a standard democratic practice in the United States. This one symbolic act was enough to give rise to mass popular uprisings in the form of Occupy, a movement we will examine in the final chapter. Citing Roger Hodge, Harper’s Magazine’s former editor, Giroux hence finds in Obama’s America clear evidence for authoritarianism – and this is so despite the promises made ‘to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet’.81 Worryingly, as he goes on to cite, ‘with few exceptions, Obama either has embraced the unconstitutional war powers claimed by his predecessor or has left the door open for their quiet adoption at some later date’. Systematically, if not intentionally, Giroux’s account shows that it is the citizens and those they have elected to represent them that are transforming America’s political culture into something that is no longer entirely akin to democracy. Joined together in an unholy union which has seen citizens surrendering their democratic rights to politicians who, in turn, have already surrendered themselves to corporate interests, there is very little here that can genuinely be considered democratic. America may not be moving toward the realisation of a traditional totalitarian state. And neither its citizens nor its elected officials may want to create a system where an official state ideology and the absence of formal opposition prevail. Still, this is not to say that decisions made have not had the effect of engendering a ‘proto-fascism’ in Giroux’s account.82 For even though ‘freedom’ 102

the coming authoritarianism remains the catchcry of both the people and the politicians, there is a sense that what is meant by the term no longer correlates with the ‘individual and collective ability to actively intervene in and shape both the nature of politics and the myriad forces bearing down on everyday life’.83 Freedom has slowly been corralled into ‘the marketbased understanding of freedom’, that is, the freedom to consume. The result, as Giroux outlines, is a governmental narrative that continues to trumpet democracy’s cause at home and abroad while, simultaneously, pursuing policies that permit the state to secretly imprison dissidents, to spy on everyday citizens and to undercut social justice and welfare initiatives. For their part, the majority of citizens have not found these practices counter to their democratic beliefs. Rather, with only a few exceptions, the public has gone along with and even rationalised their government’s action as a necessary evil. ‘What does it mean for a democracy’, Giroux then asks, when the general public either supports or is silent in the face of widely publicized events such as black and gay members of Congress being subjected to racist and homophobic taunts, a black Congressman being spat on, and the throwing of bricks through the office windows of some legislators who supported the health care bill? What does it mean for a democracy when there is little collective outrage when Sarah Palin, a leading voice in the Republican Party, mimics the tactics of vigilantes by posting a map with cross hairs on the districts of Democrats and urges her supporters on with the shameful slogan ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!’84

These practices, now common among citizens who still think themselves democrats, have increasingly become part of a political landscape which has, to borrow Wolin’s term, inverted fundamental aspects of the democratic ethos while retaining those aspects of democracy which can be managed and bought. The dangers outlined here may now be less apparent under a Democratic presidency. Yet this is not to say that they are any less real. The threat to democracy posed by democrats remains – perhaps more so now that concerned citizens and public intellectuals, thinking the Authoritarian menace has abated, have taken a collective sigh of relief.

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democracy against itself

A Word of Hope to Conclude The title of this chapter is the coming authoritarianism. Through it we have surveyed a number of scholars and writers who have documented just what this claim has meant in contemporary America. Chief among them have been the theoretical accounts of Sheldon Wolin and Henry Giroux. Together, they have made the case that American democracy has already been inverted; a product brought about by citizens and elected representatives who have willingly, if unknowingly, ceded their democratic rights to an unaccountable minority. In his book Post-Democracy, Colin Crouch makes the important point that the concrete categories of ‘democracy’ and ‘non-­ democracy’, so often resorted to in political classification exercises, are actually not all that helpful in today’s world.85 And what is more, were we to perceive the world only from these two lenses – as either democratic or non-democratic – we would both miss the nuances and misconstrue the complex political realities that exist within our own societies. For Crouch, that is why the notion of post-democracy is so apt: because it describes the various political configurations that can and have begun to appear in between the poles of democracy and non-democracy. The predicament he depicts is both complex and worrying. It is complex because the idea of post-democracy captures a condition that is at the same time democratic and non-democratic. And it is worrying because, despite its prevalence, it is so little recognised and understood in the world today. Unfortunately, this is the state that America’s democracy currently finds itself in. Think for a moment of the long list of grievances we have amassed in this chapter: the deception, misinformation and civil rights infringements which have characterised American politics after 9/11; the disproportionate authority commanded by a relative minority of extremely well-resourced and well-connected individuals, parties and corporations; the increased disengagement and political apathy of everyday citizens; and the unrestricted freedom of free markets. For both Wolin and Giroux, these changes are evocative of a broader shift that has taken place at the heart of democracy within America. While still very much grounded in the democratic constitution on which the country was founded, this shift has resorted to more authoritarian measures in order to secure democracy from the worst of itself. To this end, the list of grievances just catalogued must in fact be seen as a set of necessary measures – even indications of 104

the coming authoritarianism success – in the fight to right democracy’s path. Democracy must be managed – not left to its own devices – and this is precisely what is taking place within the United States today. Yet as this occurs, Wolin is right to conclude that a democratic inversion comes to pass: which is what happens ‘when seemingly unrelated, even disparate starting points converge and reinforce each other’.86 But unlike ancient Athens or Weimar Germany, America’s democracy is not dead and buried. Not yet. Despite worrying signs, democracy is, as Johnston writes, ‘resilient and resistant’.87 It can turn the tide and push back against the authoritarian swell just as easily as it can succumb to it. As such, even though the formal democratic machinery may have been seized by rich and powerful elites, there are nevertheless sites where citizens can still fight and win their own battles. There was at least a little irony, according to Johnston, when ‘Obama himself, a figure and practitioner of unbridled power, in his second inaugural, reminded us of democracy’s potential by invoking the power of its citizens.’88 But ironic or not, this is a democratic call to arms to all citizens: so long as democracy – and the citizens who embody it – have breath enough to continue, democracy can always be resuscitated. ‘Democracy is democratization’, as Romand Coles reminds us, meaning that where there is democracy, democrats will always be within their rights to take back what is rightly theirs.

Notes  1. James Taranto, ‘Democrats Against Democracy’, The Wall Street Journal, 28 September 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 4052970204226204576599021962517978.html.  2. Nicholas Kulish, ‘As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe’, The New York Times, 27 September 2011, http://www.nytimes. com/2011/09/28/world/as-scorn-for-vote-grows-protests-surge-arou nd-globe.html?_r=0.  3. Ibid.  4. Ibid.   5. Taranto, ‘Democrats Against Democracy’.  6. J. B. Frank, ‘Perdue jokes about suspending Congressional elections for two years’, newsobserver.com, 27 September 2011, http://pro​ jects.newsobserver.com/under_the_dome/perdue_suggests_suspending_congressional_elections_for_two_years_was_she_serious.   7. Peter Orszag, ‘Too Much of Good Thing’, New Republic, 14 September 2011, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/magazine/94940/ peter-orszag-democracy#. 105

democracy against itself   8. Nile Gardiner, ‘Why Barack Obama could be America’s last big government president’, The Telegraph, 27 September 2011, http://blogs. telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100107291/why-barack-obamacould-be-america%E2%80%99s-last-big-government-president/.  9. Ibid. 10. Steven Johnston, ‘Democracy’s Precarity and Resilience’, Theory & Event (vol. 16, no. 1, 2013). 11. Available at: http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm. 12. Joshua Kurlantzick, ‘Is Democratic Government in Decline?’, Asia Sentinel, 12 December 2012, http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=4963&Itemid= 13. Arianna Huffington, How to Overthrow the Government (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 1. 14. Ibid. 15. Id., 2. 16. Ibid. 17. Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007), 9. 18. Ibid. 19. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times, 38. 20. Id., 24. 21. Paul Smith, Primitive America: the ideology of capitalist democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 87. 22. Id., 88. 23. Ibid. 24. Paul Bigioni, ‘The Recurrence of Fascism: Today’s Corporate Dominance Eerily Similar to Pre-Fascist Era in Europe’, The Monitor, 1 September 2005, http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/ monitor/september-2005-recurrence-fascism. 25. Ibid. 26. Huffington, How to Overthrow the Government, 1–2. 27. Jodi Dean, Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 76. 28. Robert Kuttner, Ticking Time Bombs: The New Conservative Assaults on Democracy (New York: New Press, 1996), x–xi. 29. Noam Chomsky, ‘The Corporate Takeover of US Democracy’, Chomsky.info, 24 January 2010, http://www.chomsky.info/arti​ cles/20100124.htm. 30. ‘The 2012 Money Race: Compare the Candidates’, The New York Times, http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/campaign-finance. 31. Robert Reich, ‘Our Incredible Shrinking Democracy’, AlterNet, 2 February 2010, http://www.alternet.org/story/145512/our_incredible_ shrinking_democracy. 106

the coming authoritarianism 32. Jason West, Dare to Hope: Saving American Democracy (New York: Hyperion, 2005), 2. 33. Matt Guardino and Dean Synder, ‘The Tea Party and the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Mainstreaming New Right Populism in the Corporate News Media’, New Political Science (vol. 34, no. 4, 2012), 532. 34. Id., 542. 35. Noam Chomsky, ‘The Disconnect in US Democracy’, Khaleej Times, 29 October 2004, http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle. asp?xfile=data/opinion/2004/October/opinion_October46.xml&sec tion=opinion&col=. 36. Lexington, ‘Unreality Television’, The Economist, 23 February 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21572204-thoughclever-and-watchable-new-cult-drama-about-congress-misses-impor​ tant. 37. Caitlin McDevitt, ‘Lawmakers review “House of Cards”’, Politico, 12 March 2013, http://www.politico.com/blogs/click/2013/03/lawmak​ersreview-house-of-cards-159014.html. 38. Lexington, ‘Unreality Television’. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism (New York: M. Evans and Co. Inc., 1980), 1. 42. Id., 3. 43. Id., 7 44. Id., 6. 45. Id., 7. 46. Id., 239. 47. Conason, It Can Happen Here, 11–12. 48. Id., 138–9. 49. Smith, Primitive America, 89. 50. Id., 89. 51. Marc J. Hetherington and Elizabeth Suhay, ‘Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror’, American Journal of Political Science (vol. 55, no. 3, 2011). 52. Id., 548–9. 53. Id., 557. 54. Sheldon Wolin, ‘Inverted Totalitarianism’, The Nation, 1 May 2003, http://www.thenation.com/article/inverted-totalitarianism. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our Democracy’, Newsday, 18 July 2003, http://www.commondreams.org/views03/ 0718-07.htm. 58. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, xviii. 107

democracy against itself 59. Id., xxi. 60. Id., 44, 46. 61. Sheldon Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’, Constellations (vol. 1, no. 1, 1994), 11. 62. Id., 23. 63. Id., 13. 64. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 44. 65. Id., 45–6. 66. Id., 56. 67. Howard, ‘From Anti-Communism to Anti-totalitarianism,’ 551. 68. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), 4. 69. Id., 7. 70. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 46–7. 71 Id., ix. 72. Id., xvi. 73. Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 4. 74. Henry A. Giroux, ‘Dirty Democracy and State Terrorism: The Politics of the New Authoritarianism in the United States’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (vol. 26, no. 2, 2006), 163. 75. Id., 172; Henry A. Giroux, ‘The Emerging Authoritarianism in the United States: Political Culture under the Bush/Cheney Administration’, symploke (vol. 14, no. 1/2, 2006), 98–100. 76. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism,18. 77. Id., 16; Giroux, ‘The Emerging Authoritarianism in the United States’, 98. 78. Henry A. Giroux, ‘Barack Obama and the Resurgent Specter of Authoritarianism’, JAC: Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics (vol. 31, nos. 3–4, 2011), http://www.jaconlinejournal.com/archives/ vol31.3.html. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Roger Hodge cited in Ibid. Also see Romand Coles, ‘“It’s the ‘We’, Stupid”, or Reflections toward an Ecology of Radical Democratic Theory and Practice’, Theory & Event (vol. 16, no. 1, 2013) for a more comprehensive analysis of the failed promises and the worrying signs evident under Obama’s presidency. 82. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism, 19. Emphasis as original. 83. Henry. A Giroux, ‘Democracy and the Threat of Authoritarianism: Politics Beyond Barack Obama’, truthout, 15 February 2010, http:// truth-out.org/print/56890. 84. Giroux, ‘Barack Obama and the Resurgent Specter of Authoritarianism’. 108

the coming authoritarianism 85. Crouch, Post-Democracy, 19. 86. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 46. 87. Johnston, ‘Democracy’s Precarity and Resilience’. 88. Ibid.

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5

China’s New Authoritarianism: A Glimpse at Our Post-Democratic Future?

The word of hope on which the last chapter ended is poignant and worth repeating. Even though democratic America is in crisis – some would say a crisis of its own making – there is no denying that the United States remains the world’s leading example of what a democracy should look like. That aside, as Johnston reminds us toward the end of the last chapter, democracy is a resilient and resistant species. It is important not to forget that even as political forecasters like Wolin and Giroux point to its less sanguine future. Yet far from forgetting, it seems that many refuse to even entertain the thought that democracy is in crisis at all. Against the type of evidence outlined in the previous chapter, many democrats in America have habitually thought that their democracy’s future is assured. They think that, however flawed and inverted their democracy is, America will not likely follow the path of Athens or Weimar. And they may be right. But the question we need to ask ourselves is what will a democracy like America’s become if it continues on the trajectory that a Wolin or Giroux has outlined? If not Athens or Weimar, what will be the end product of America’s coming authoritarianism? Of course, both Wolin and Giroux have already provided answers to this question in their own ways. We have seen what the looming authoritarianism means in their analysis. Yet as convincing as their prognoses are, they suffer from the defect that neither analysis is complete. Symptomatic of the fact that America’s coming authoritarianism is still in many ways yet to come – i.e. the fate of democracy has not yet been sealed – we have no concrete example or blueprint of what inverted totalitarianism will look like when or if it ever blossoms. Wolin’s and Giroux’s portrait of an America rushing headlong into something sitting between traditional conceptions of democracy and authoritarianism is both atypical and beyond simplistic categorisations. There is nothing that really resembles inverted totalitarianism; it is its own unique beast. Because of this, the traits 110

china’s new authoritarianism which Wolin and Giroux have documented of America’s democracy seem stuck in the world of theory or political deduction. We have no other portrait of what inverted totalitarianism is capable of – beyond the interpretation offered by these two thinkers, which obviously is open to dispute. Be that as it may, there is enough in what Wolin and Giroux have outlined to hazard a suggestion (or more accurately a comparison) of what America’s democracy might produce if it continues down its present path. Make no mistake, this is a provocative suggestion. There are many caveats and many exceptions involved. A conventional analysis would only draw such a comparison under certain, exceptional circumstances. Still, by drawing this stark contrast, we may funnily get a clearer picture of what Wolin and Giroux have been forecasting. In this chapter, the task is to draw parallels between America’s coming authoritarianism and the political system that is currently emerging in the world’s other superpower: China. Strangely enough, if viewed from a certain vantage point, it is China’s evolving system of governance where we can get a glimpse of what America’s postdemocratic future might look like. In China’s present we can glean the crucial insight that far from desisting, democracies like America’s may be more likely to become increasingly hybridised creatures, suspended somewhere in the chasm between democracy and totalitarianism. Should Americans choose to continue politically as they have been, then it is quite possible that the democracy to come will have an authoritarian edge about it. With its strengths harnessed and weaknesses jettisoned, this will see democracy implicated in its own continued suppression, if not overthrow. To this end, this examination of China’s new authoritarianism is really a continuation of America’s inverted totalitarianism by other means. But a comparative analysis such as this is likely to attract criticisms for a variety of reasons. Analysing China’s new authoritarianism in association with what is taking place democratically within the United States is controversial and it begs the question of whether and to what extent this study adheres to the ‘comparative method’: the scientific approach ‘of discovering empirical relationships among variables’.1 Being a method, and not just ‘a convenient term vaguely symbolizing the focus of one’s research interests’, implies that comparative analyses must strictly observe a number of key practices and conventions if they are to reach conclusions which can be deemed conceptually valid.2 111

democracy against itself To this end, studies in comparative politics have tended to set up categories of analytical differentiation, something which is needed in order to make comparison possible, while seeking to avoid too much conceptual stretching. There are several ways that scholars have attempted to do this. First, conceptual stretching can be circumvented if particular concepts are avoided in the study of cases for which they are blatantly unsuited. While some degree of differentiation is of course inescapable and indeed inherent to any comparative enterprise, when incongruous concepts and cases are thrown together they can render the comparison deficient. In the second instance, conceptual stretching can be prevented if analyses accurately discern the political attributes of the regime being studied from the generic traits of the society at large or, on the other hand, from the more minute policies that were made by certain governments at certain times. While this analysis will do its best to prevent conceptual stretching of the sort just described, it will quickly become apparent to readers that its purpose is not to undertake a comparative analysis in the conventional or scientific sense. Instead, any use of the term comparison should be taken to imply other ‘forms of comparison which the political scientist can use when in a less scientific mood’ and which, for F. F. Ridley, can also produce equally ‘useful ends’.3 Specifically in this instance, readers should take comparison to imply a comparative provocation in which seemingly inappropriate concepts are applied to ostensibly ill-suited cases. Doing this may seem quizzical for those more used to a strict scientific approach to comparative analysis – if for no other reason than it appears to foster the very type of conceptual stretching just denounced. Indeed, comparing China and the United States from a scientific perspective would only work if an ‘arbitrary’ or at least an inconsistent standard were used: one which defined democracy one way when assessing the nature of China’s political system and one which defined democracy another way when assessing the nature of America’s political system. However, by seeking to read China’s new authoritarianism together with America’s inverted totalitarianism, the goal here is not purposely to use an arbitrary or inconsistent standard of comparison. The objective is not to fall foul unwittingly of conceptual stretching. Rather, the aim is to demonstrate how two political systems which may seem inappropriate for comparison at first can, upon further investigation, reveal distinct parallels. Specifically, the chapter will make the case that the political developments taking place within the United States today – as outlined by Wolin and Giroux – will 112

china’s new authoritarianism increasingly resemble fundamental traits exhibited in the politics of modern-day China. The only point of difference is that whereas China’s political system has arguably been made more democratic by its societal developments, America’s political system has paradoxically been made less democratic.

Nothing to Compare? But however one sells it, the argument that ‘America’s democratic future lies in China’ is not an easy one to make. No typical political leader and commentator in China or the United States would respond to this comparison without at least some quite serious reservations. For instance, the view from Washington is that China remains resistant to democracy.4 Despite best efforts by the West, China continues down its own path. It is now the world’s largest nondemocratic nation. For these reasons, it is still perceived by many Western powers as an ‘outlaw regime’ potentially at odds with liberal democratic values and American hegemony.5 Even today, some Western political commentators – inappropriately perhaps – invoke the horrific events of Tiananmen Square as an enduring emblem of China’s rejection of democracy and human rights.6 This is a view that the Communist Party of China (CPC) has had a hand in bringing on itself. Take three relatively recent incidents, for example. The first was the CPC’s public condemnation of the Nobel Committee in 2010 for awarding the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo for his human rights activism in China.7 A second incident occurred when the CPC cracked down on dissent throughout China by detaining a number of the nation’s high-profile activists and dissidents, including the well-known artist Ai Weiwei.8 And finally, the case of Bo Xilai – the former Communist Party chief of Chongqing – is a third example that has raised serious questions about the nature of leadership, governance and official corruption in China.9 None of these developments bodes well for China’s global image and reputation, particularly in the West. Even despite China’s efforts to fight corruption and abandon previous practices, there remains a bias among some Western analysts and states people that, politically speaking, little has changed in China since the time of Mao. Of course, the careful observer would see the errors in these interpretations. But for those who do not, China’s rise as a global power is now more a cause for concern than an opportunity for engagement and dialogue. 113

democracy against itself Many of these mistaken sentiments were reiterated by United States Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, when then Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Washington in January 2011. When asked by Jon Ralston in an interview about the Chinese President’s visit, Reid responded by saying: ‘Jon, I’m going to go back to Washington tomorrow and meet with the president of China. He is a dictator. He can do a lot of things through the form of government they have.’10 Then, having perhaps realised the callousness of his brazen remark, the Senator backpedalled, but only slightly, adding: ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have said “dictator”. But they have a different type of government than we have and that’s an understatement.’ To be expected, the criticisms have not just been one-sided. Beijing has given as good as it has got. As Eric Li, a Shanghai-based venture capitalist, wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article, China is now showing the world that there is indeed a viable alternative to the political vision which the United States has been advocating. China’s politics and governing institutions are resilient, according to Li, and that is a good thing. As he argues, ‘[w]hile China’s might grow, the West’s ills multiply: since winning the Cold War, the United States has, in one generation, allowed its middle class to disintegrate.’11 Not only this, but ‘[i]ts infrastructure languishes in disrepair, and its politics, both electoral and legislative, have fallen captive to money and special interests’ – a claim we have heard from a number of American analysts too. And in line with the view that American democracy has worked to undermine itself, Li concludes his indictment by noting that the ‘West’s woes are self-inflicted’. For him, Claims that Western electoral systems are infallible have hampered selfcorrection. Elections are seen as ends in themselves, not merely means to good governance. Instead of producing capable leaders, electoral politics have made it very difficult for good leaders to gain power. And in the few cases when they do, they are paralyzed by their own political and legal systems.

In a similar vein, China’s newly appointed President, Xi Jinping, has not been backward when it comes to criticising the West. In a speech made to overseas Chinese citizens on a 2009 visit to Mexico before he became President, Xi remarked that ‘there are some bored foreigners, with full stomachs, who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us. First, China doesn’t export revolution. Second, China doesn’t export hunger and poverty. Third, China doesn’t come and cause you headaches. What more is there to be said?’12 Here, the 114

china’s new authoritarianism talk of the West and of foreigners should primarily be construed as America and Americans. Much of this came to a head recently when the Chinese Cabinet responded to an American report assessing the situation of rights around the world. The criticisms put forward by the information office of China’s State Council drew attention to America’s poor record of sex-, race- and religion-based discrimination; the human rights abuses committed by its military in its various incursions into Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan; and the fact that most ‘American citizens do not enjoy a genuinely equal right to vote’.13 That less than two-thirds of citizens voted during the 2012 Presidential election in America is an indication, according to the Chinese Cabinet report, of a political system that no longer practices what it preaches. On both sides of the Pacific, then, there is a prevailing sentiment that ‘ours is the better system while theirs is increasingly an unsustainable civilisation’. True, the formal position of state officials in America and China may be geared toward putting differences aside in order to achieve a workable relationship. But this outward façade has always concealed a deeper wariness, not to mention the sense of exceptionalism, which infuses how each power views the other. No two countries and no two political systems could be more dissimilar than America’s and China’s. And yet, for all that separates these two nations, there are increasingly areas of overlap too. For one, even though China remains known as ‘a brutal authoritarian state that violently oppresses its citizens’, it is fast becoming a country dominated by ‘[s]kyscrapers, urban professionals in Italian suits dashing in to Starbucks for their morning latte [and] streets filled with shiny new BMWs’.14 Much has changed since the days of Mao, and much is still changing. On this count alone, traditional and popular conceptions of politics in China are less cogent than they might seem. Indeed, for Peter Foster, China may still be ‘far from free, but three decades after 150 years of invasions, civil wars and political upheaval finally came to a close, it is a long way from the totalitarian state it has at times appeared to be’.15 Likewise, scholars like Baogang He have emphasised from as early as the mid-1990s that the ‘totalitarian paradigm is no longer appropriate’ when it comes to understanding contemporary China.16 It may not yet be a democracy in the Western sense, and it may still have a questionable reputation when it comes to issues like human rights, political repression and official accountability and corruption, but there are recent developments which suggest that neither 115

democracy against itself is it any longer a traditional totalitarian or even an authoritarian state. For those willing to reflect critically on what is taking place in Washington, as the previous chapter has attempted to do, we may come to the conclusion that there has been a similar shift, where what we think we know is no longer completely accurate. America’s democracy and democratic landscape is changing. For those not above examining the ailments and hypocrisies besetting our own democratic traditions, we may even see this happening before our eyes. We will see the increased union that thrives between state and corporate power. We will see inherent anti-democratic outcomes being produced by democrats using what are ostensibly democratic mechanisms. And we will see a political culture where popularly elected leaders are unrepentant about curtailing the democratic rights and freedoms of citizens in an effort to stamp out dissent, terror and other threats to the state. Brought about by the citizens themselves, these are the traits of inverted totalitarianism smouldering in a political system and culture that, like modern-day China’s, is neither truly democratic nor completely totalitarian. And that is what this chapter will attempt to bring to the foreground: the prospect that China’s new authoritarianism is a phenomenon not altogether distinct from the inverted totalitarianism that is consuming contemporary American democracy. This is another way of saying that in China we may be getting a glimpse at what America’s post-democratic future might look like if it continues to manage and incorporate democracy the way it has been doing for decades.

China’s New Authoritarianism Democracy is frequently thought of as an inevitability, something with universal appeal. Backed by such sentiments, scholars have thus been making the case that China will eventually succumb to democracy’s urges like any other regime when exposed to capitalism and economic development.17 The projection follows a typical line: China will be made more democratic as a result of its interactions with the outside world, a world in which democracy is the lingua franca. Add to this China’s expanding middle class, many of whom, scholars argue, will begin to demand the type of democratic rights and freedoms which have typically accompanied increasing economic development. This is the thinking behind America’s engagement with China. Increased economic engagement and liberalisation should, 116

china’s new authoritarianism in turn, lead to increased political reform. ‘To Washington,’ writes Ying Ma in Hoover’s Policy Review, ‘all good things go together’ – meaning that ‘[i]f China encountered some element of what exists in a democratic society . . . it would be unable to stop that element’s accompanying democratic attributes from seeping into society as a whole’.18 But this line of thinking, as she goes on to point out, has proved illusory in China’s case. In Ma’s words, China and its rulers have somehow ‘managed to compartmentalize economic modernization from political liberalization’ as well as having ‘determined to neutralize the democratizing powers of liberal institutions and instruments’. China, in many instances, has used economic development to suppress or alleviate the need for political reform. It is economic modernisation first; all else is seen as secondary by both the leadership and the majority of citizens. For these reasons, the Chinese situation has not followed the welltrodden path to democracy, previously thought of as inevitable or at least highly probable when certain conditions are met. China is unique and it resists easy categorisation; something which is to be expected of a country of over one billion ethnically diverse peoples. Where other countries have democratised, China refuses to follow suit. Even so, China continues to change. Though seemingly resistant to democracy, China’s social, economic and cultural fabric have transformed beyond all recognition in just a little over two decades. This has been no less true of its political landscape. ‘What one can say’, as Andrew Nathan recently reflected, ‘is that more and more people believe some kind of [political] change is coming.’19 It is undeniable that the pace of change in China’s political realm has been far eclipsed by the ferocity of its economic revolution.20 But nevertheless the Chinese politics of today is not the same politics of 4 June 1989. What seems clear right now is that China’s political system has changed, and it continues to change. But what has it changed into? If not democracy, what then? To answer this question, a good place to start is by reflecting on what China’s political system is not. It is not, as many like to think, a traditional communist system any longer. ‘Communism has lost its capacity to inspire the Chinese’, writes Daniel Bell, author of China’s New Confucianism.21 This much is clear. Though the Chinese Communist Party remains very much in charge, and Socialism continues to be the state’s official ideology, other schools of thought and ways of living have flooded into this rapidly developing country. 117

democracy against itself ‘Chinese Communism’ now uses or fuses the logic of neo-liberal capitalism and it is less afraid to embrace traditional Chinese philosophies, like Confucianism. Moreover, China is no longer a totalitarian or even an authoritarian state, at least not in the conventional sense. This state of affairs certainly offers a stark contrast against a China which has, since 1949, primarily been known for its Maoist brand of government control.22 Today, the majority of people enjoy a greater level of personal freedom and choice than at any time in the past century.23 Cultural and economic – if not always political – pluralism are not only tolerated by the state, but actively encouraged in some instances. P. H. Yu, who is Chairman of the Tsinghua University Center for US–China Relations, recently said that ‘China has seen the emergence of a pluralistic society since the implementation of the reform and opening up of policy’ several decades ago.24 This is part and parcel of China’s continued development, he argues, and it will gradually rid the country of its former ‘authoritarian practices and dogmatic (draconian) views’. Already, there is ample evidence to support these claims. For instance, citing Henry Rowen’s analysis, both the Chinese legal system and media now defy Communist ideology and CPC dictates on a frequent basis.25 Similarly, Dali Yang has made the case that, even with the lack of democracy, ‘the casual visitor to China would quickly note how much more freedom the Chinese enjoy today compared with the early years of economic reforms, let alone in the Maoist era’.26 Diversity, as such, is the keyword that Yang uses to describe China. The brief description above shows that China is neither fully democratic nor completely repressive. It sits, paradoxically, somewhere between these two poles. Despite the CPC’s refusal to embrace liberal democracy outright, China has in the reform period moved into new territory.27 ‘One-party dictatorship’ has slowly transformed into a type of ‘one-party administration’ that seeks to guide the people with a greater level of benevolence and accountability.28 Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Richard McGregor thus dispels the myth that the CPC still ‘controls all aspects of life in China’.29 It does not. Some in the CPC might want it to. But that will be a struggle. As such, central though the CPC remains in the realm of official state politics, the Party is now overseeing a more heterogeneous China and a new generation of Chinese citizens who are bolder and less unified in outlook. It is therefore true to say that China’s political system is now a hybrid of structures and influences drawn from its own unique tradi118

china’s new authoritarianism tions as well as from adopted foreign customs.30 As the Australian strategic analyst Michael Wesley makes clear: ‘To look closely at the country is to realise how little you really comprehend it, in all its complexity and contradictions.’31 China is paradoxical, ‘deliberately opaque’, a ‘society of many, furiously discordant voices’, as Wesley puts it. Neither the CPC nor the system of political governance it oversees can be defined any longer in monolithic or straightforward authoritarian terms. As such, if there is any one way to explain what is going on in China today, politically speaking, it may be through the paradigm of soft or ‘new’ authoritarianism. The hybridity currently splitting China into constituent parts cannot only be explained by the notion of new authoritarianism. It can, moreover, help paint a picture of an otherwise indefinable country caught somewhere between an authoritarian past and a possible post-democratic future, where consultative forums and electoral politics are, for the most part, willingly subsumed by a state ruled by the few. What new authoritarianism does for China, inverted totalitarianism is doing for the United States. The only difference being that what we are seeing in China, we will not see in America for some time yet. In fact, we will only see traces of China’s new authoritarianism in America if citizens and politicians there continue to make the same decisions and embrace the forces sweeping democracy’s foundations from under its feet. Even so, outlining the key features of China’s new authoritarianism is instructive here as it can be read as a cautionary tale, one that foretells the post-democratic reality that democracies working against themselves can produce. So, with this said, what defines China’s new authoritarianism? And why is it so special? In the first instance, we can perhaps draw some insights from Minxin Pei, an expert on US–China relations. As Pei sets out, new authoritarianism is a notion that contains three key features, without which it would be indistinguishable from its conventional counterpart.32 But before explaining just what these three features are, and why they differ from traditional forms of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, we may be helped if we familiarise ourselves with what totalitarianism and authoritarianism are. Totalitarianism, as its name suggests, typically denotes a political system in which the state’s domain of operation is ‘total’.33 By this, we can take a state’s objective to control the whole of society, ranging from the private life of its citizens to the dominant political ideology that is enforced on all. There is no room for citizens to assert 119

democracy against itself their political rights or for individuals to exercise any freedoms. The state determines all aspects of life under totalitarianism. By contrast, authoritarianism is most frequently characterised by the existence of a single authority: one individual, group or party that possesses all power.34 Under an authoritarian regime, the monopoly of power has the effect of preventing the majority – the masses, the citizenry – from engaging in the political process. They are merely ‘the power addressees’, though addressees whose right to ‘life, liberty, and property are secure insofar as they do not affect the exercise of political power as such’.35 Pei’s concept of new authoritarianism differs from these traditional forms of top-down rule in three main ways. Firstly, what is symptomatic of new authoritarianism is the declining frequency and severity of political repression experienced by the so-called power addressees when compared with traditional totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. With regard to China, the move to this softer form of authoritarianism has been reflected in a number of everyday practices. Even though the country’s human rights record remains far from ideal, and domestic and international protestors are right to draw attention to the continuing infringements in this respect, it would be wrong to say that China’s stance on human rights has not changed. More and more, the CPC now tends to target primarily prominent political dissidents – something which Pei argues is characteristic of the move toward soft authoritarianism. This is not to say that there are not upsurges of state focus on dissent from time to time. Yet unlike traditional authoritarian regimes, the use of state violence against its own citizens is no longer seen as an offensive strategy. It increasingly becomes viewed as a last defence, when the tacit social contract empowering the regime to rule is breached by those who step beyond the allotted bounds of the personal, political and economic liberties granted. At all other times, as this idea goes, society functions along broadly democratic lines and is governed by a raft of institutions which are increasingly more accountable and transparent.36 There are some commentators who say that this may have been the case under the early leadership of Hu and Wen. However, with Xi Jinping’s arrival, there is already a sense that new authoritarianism may be giving way to an older, harder style of authoritarian rule. This may or may not prove correct; for now, though, it is still too early to make structural comments on Xi and where his leadership is taking China. The second distinct feature of new authoritarianism is an enhanced 120

china’s new authoritarianism accountability and transparency established to keep intra-elite competition in check and to ensure a more equitable distribution of power in society. Here, we can list the increasing number and frequency of elections for leadership positions, the mandatory retirement of leaders and promotion based on merits as empirical examples of developments in this direction. Of course, the institutionalisation of formal norms and laws whose purpose is to monitor the use and abuse of power by elites may not bring about democracy as such. But they do assure a more transparent and harmonious leadership that can no longer afford to be detached from or indifferent to the citizens they lead. In this regard, not only is the state’s hold on power no longer ‘total’. It is also no longer characterised by a simple dichotomy between those who possess power and those who are the power addressees. Finally, the third distinctive feature of new authoritarianism that distinguishes it from traditional authoritarianism is the move that generally takes place toward greater institutional pluralism. Though by no means equivalent to Western ideas of the separation of powers, pluralism in China has started to produce more institutional freedom, greater legal independence, increasing grass roots political activism and a growing civil society. The goal is that checks and balances, at all levels, begin to ensure that the dictatorship of the few becomes more and more unlikely. It begins to ensure that the CPC remains in touch with and accountable to the people it oversees. This feature, quite clearly, sets this newer form of authoritarianism apart from any of the characteristics of traditional totalitarianism and authoritarianism. There are numerous policies that can be cited as examples of China’s new authoritarianism. However, for present purposes, drawing attention to three policies is enough to give some concrete illustrations of these broader systemic changes. During the 17th National Party Congress in 2007, the CPC acknowledged that the continued existence of one-party rule was a cause for political consternation among many actors, both within and beyond the Party. As such, in an effort to rectify this, they introduced the principle of ‘inner-party democracy’ – something which ideally exemplifies the move toward new authoritarianism in China.37 Unlike in other democratic societies, the CPC has no formal political opposition. Citizens in China cannot vote other parties into power when they feel dissatisfied with the direction that the CPC is headed. Recognising this, inner-party democracy represents 121

democracy against itself something of a compromise. Instead of sanctioning the rise of formal political opposition, it endeavours to grant ordinary party members more power to shape the election of Party leaders and the making of Party policies. Following on from this, a second example is the increasing importance of the idea of supervision (jiandu).38 According to former Premier Wen Jiabao, because ‘[a]bsolute power without supervision corrupts absolutely’, the Chinese system must learn to embrace supervision from a diverse range of media and other civic sources.39 Village elections, a more competent and authoritative judiciary and the emergence of a vibrant civil society are all important elements in this regard. This is the role explicitly envisioned for the broader citizenry, not just members of the CPC. Though what the citizens are actually capable of doing is still uncertain and different from forum to forum, province to province, a government that is supervised by the people it rules is very different from a government that seeks total control over all aspects of life. And so, the third example: the growth in both the number and scope of activities of non-governmental organisations in China.40 The presence of NGOs in any setting makes it more difficult for absolute power to corrupt absolutely given that it, first, increases the number of voices and, then, gives those voices institutional and moral support. With estimates that have indicated that as many as three million NGOs exist in China today, these organisations have begun to make their case heard in relation to issues as diverse as ‘the environment, public health, consumer rights, and the right of what the Chinese call “vulnerable groups,” including women, children, migrants, gays, and other groups’.41 Less formally, China has also in the last decade witnessed an explosion in the popularity and number of tea houses, internet cafes, art galleries and private salons, all of which contribute to the growth and strength of its bourgeoning civil society.42 For all these reasons, the point is that China has clearly moved beyond the traditional totalitarian state paradigm. Power, though still centralised and maintained by one party, is no longer ‘total’. That is, the state’s monopoly on power has changed; it has become more attuned to the people, who now oversee the exercise of power more than ever before. But on the back of an evolving political system – premised on marginalising political repression, increasing accountability and transparency and ensuring greater institutional pluralism – China has also moved beyond the traditional authori122

china’s new authoritarianism tarian paradigm. Certainly, it remains an authoritarian state to the extent that there continues to be one political party. But the scope of the party’s power, along with how the party sees its relationship with the people, has been fundamentally altered during the last decades. In short, the country and its leaders have instituted a range of policies and reforms that have pushed its system of political governance closer in configuration to that of a democracy while still remaining authoritarian in nature. To the extent that the analogy works, it can be said that China has built for itself a bridge that is today suspended in the chasm between democracy, on the one hand, and totalitarianism, on the other. This is why it must be labelled as a system of new authoritarianism – something which, as Andrew Nathan argues, has as its ultimate goal to make ‘the authoritarian system more fair, more effective, and more – not less – sustainable’.43

Authoritarian Democracy More to the point, or so it seems, Chinese leaders and Party members are now employing democracy, adopting many of its ideas and practices, in order to make their authoritarian system more fair, more effective and more – not less – sustainable. Despite the official rejection of democracy – as least the liberal variant of democracy – China’s new authoritarianism is not devoid of democratic tactics and popular backing. This is something that will become clearer with more unpacking. But even the casual observer would probably be aware that in the last several years in particular China’s leaders have increasingly deployed the rhetoric of democracy and democratisation, and less so Communism, in relation to the country’s political reforms. This is not actually a new development. Indeed, democracy is nothing new to China. Numerous waves of democratisation have swept through China during the past century.44 From the Nationalists who coined the ‘Three People’s Principles’ (sanminzhuyi) to Mao’s concept of the ‘New Democracy’ (da minzhu), there has been a uniquely Chinese way of practising democracy, even a ‘hidden democratic legacy’ that, according to Orville Schell, is frequently ignored.45 Today though, the language of democracy is frequently used both by everyday citizens and CPC officials – often in reactionary ways. Citizens, especially those at the margins of Chinese society, employ democracy as a rally cry for the greater populace to rise and demand more freedom from the government. Such is the call to arms set out 123

democracy against itself in the Charter 08, for example, a Chinese manifesto signed by many of the country’s leading intellectuals and pro-democracy and human rights campaigners. At the core of this document is a set of fundamental principles calling for human rights, equality, republicanism, constitutional rule and, of course, democracy in China.46 Through the advocacy of this relative minority, a more sizeable majority has slowly become politicised also. Spurred on by the governmental injustices meted out to the country’s farmers, migrant workers, ethnic minorities, artists and intellectuals, more ‘[p]eople want to know how the government is affecting them, including whether it is effectively administering public services and honestly providing promised benefits’.47 There is desire for transparency in local and national politics and for increased free speech and media.48 Participation in elections is on the rise. As all this is happening, pressure continues to mount on the government to embed ‘constitutionalism, rule of law, transparency, openness, societal autonomy, and civil liberties’ into the fabric of Chinese politics.49 China’s top leaders have not responded to these calls to reform the political system with inaction. Accelerating political reforms was particularly central during the administration of Hu and Wen. In fact, both leaders were strong advocates of democratising elements of Chinese politics.50 At the 17th National Party Congress in 2007, for example, Party leaders sent out the clear message ‘to expand people’s democracy’.51 This would, among other things, entail a renewed vision of Chinese citizenship that enables the people to ‘enjoy democratic rights in a more extensive way’ and ‘to participate, to express their views and to supervise the administration’. President Hu affirmed this by stating that in China the people are to become ‘masters of the country’.52 It is the people’s right, he declared, ‘to be informed, to participate, to be heard, and to oversee’. The Party, as such, would be subject to greater scrutiny in its exercise of power and in its decision-making capacity. Similarly, Premier Wen has said that democracy is a universal value that includes ‘the three important components: elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on checks and balances’.53 When he spoke to the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of Sciences, in 2011, he pointed out that: ‘Tomorrow’s China will be a country that fully achieves democracy, the rule of law, fairness, and justice.’54 And while he believes that what is best for China is a form of democracy that best reflects its unique history and needs, Wen openly associates democracy promotion with the market liberalism thriving in China, and elsewhere, today.55 Many of these remarks were again echoed by Wen during his final 124

china’s new authoritarianism news conference at the 2012 annual session of the national legislature in Beijing. Though he spoke at length on specific government priorities, such as the initiatives to increase the minimum wage in China, improve education and employment opportunities and to continually expand the country’s safety net, which would include greater scrutiny of the country’s high income earners, the focus of his talk was primarily that of systemic reform. Speaking as much to China’s citizens as to the new generation of leaders set to take his and President Hu’s place, Wen urged his countrymen and women to ‘press ahead with both economic structural reform and political structural reform, in particular reform in the leadership system of our party and country’.56 By this he meant the need to continually ensure that China’s political system moves in a democratic direction, something which the more specific Party policies outlined were directed toward. But even by saying this, Wen made clear that, crucially, any such democratic reform would by necessity take place in a ‘step-by-step manner’ and in accordance with China’s socialist traditions. For him, the risks that China runs of not democratising along these lines are that ‘the gains we have made in this area will be lost, new problems that have cropped up in China’s society will not be fundamentally resolved and such a historic tragedy as the Cultural Revolution may happen again’. What we can take away from these statements and trends is that China has begun to affirm the value of and need for democracy. It has to, according to Merle Goldman.57 Faced with mounting calls to reform the country’s political system, Chinese leaders have had to utilise the language of democracy to placate those discontented with their lot. It is a case of ‘democratize or die’, as Yasheng Huang puts it: to survive and retain legitimacy, the CPC has to take reform seriously.58 But what we should also take away from these developments is that a country as proud and powerful as China, with a rich history and culture, will not democratise nor adopt a version of democracy completely as other democracies have done so in the past, especially democracies in the West. Instead, it will selectively mould and fashion a system of democratic governance to suit its own history, economy and culture – a ‘democracy with Chinese characteristics’.59 The result may not be the traditional type of liberal or even socialist democracy as they have been practised within other cultures. It is more likely, in Bell’s estimation, to be a model of ‘democracy at the bottom, meritocracy at the top, with room for experimentation in between’.60 Again, it is the hybridised nature of reform that most aptly captures China’s path to reform. 125

democracy against itself For Yu Keping, it is therefore undeniable that democracy is incrementally taking hold in people’s minds and the country’s key political institutions.61 Critically, the development of so-called ‘incremental democracy’ is key to understanding China’s path to democracy as it is not preoccupied with one theory or doctrine of democracy but embraces all useful elements from various theories and doctrines; it pays full attention to the universality of democracy with a good understanding of the particular Chinese situation and traditional culture; . . . it advocates full use of existing conditions to push Chinese democracy forward incrementally by path-dependence.62

What is important, accordingly, is not this or that theory of democracy but the overall ‘effects’ that democracy will have on the pre-existing political system of the country. And why this is important for China is because there is a widely held cultural predisposition that views rapid, wholesale change as a negative thing.63 Change that happens incrementally is preferred as a matter of course for the reason that it does not threaten or undo what is already in place and already functioning. The Chinese value political stability. They value harmony in society. As Confucius taught, ‘Harmony is something to be cherished’.64 Understanding the significance of this, the CPC has pledged to democratise the country’s institutions and practices in the light of the existing cultural and political order. This is where the political idea of the ‘harmonious society’ (shehuizhuyi hexie shehui) comes from. First adopted by a resolution of the 16th Party Congress in 2002, it was later defined at the 4th Plenary Session in 2004 as ‘a society built on democracy and rule of law, justice and equality, trust and truthfulness, amity and vitality, order and stability, and a harmonious relation with nature’.65 And indeed, if we examine the defining characteristics of incremental democracy as set out by Yu, he is at pains to emphasise the importance of social stability, gradual and steady change, and the dangers of disrespecting the established constitutional and basic laws already in place.66 For the China expert, Heike Holbig, this means that the party-state will remain central to any efforts at reform; it is the role of the Party and the state to ensure that change occurs smoothly and harmoniously.67 That said, incremental democracy is not just about ‘holding everything in place’; it is more about achieving a ‘modern dynamic stability (dongtai wending), which depends on “channeling everything into its proper place” (yi shu wei zhu)’.68 By calibrating democratic initiatives in China to its existing his126

china’s new authoritarianism torical, economic and cultural milieu, though, transition will be slow, sometimes infuriatingly so. But what it will not be is ad hoc. Instead, it will avoid the worst of the chaos and uncertainty of revolutionary democratic transformations – something which, as said, the Chinese seem especially fearful of.69 Change will be deferential to and reflective of China’s political culture. From this, it is clear to see that China’s use of democracy is not straightforward. Rejecting the ‘one size fits all’ moniker often implicit in the democracy promotion literature, China’s leaders are going their own way and at their own pace; choosing a democracy that comprises ‘an eclectic mix of Marxism with both Western and traditional Chinese schools of thought adapted to suit China’s particular socio-political circumstances and stage of economic development’.70 It is important that these aspects and influences be acknowledged, in part because they are, in many ways, the most significant aspects and influences for the Chinese today. Certainly, any careful reading of what China’s leaders have been saying will quickly run up against a paradox: for all the talk of democracy, there remains more talk of socialism. In line with the CPC’s aim to become more legitimate and resilient through democratisation, Wen has said that there is no contradiction in wedding democracy to socialism. Writing in a People’s Daily article, he argued that Party leaders ‘never view socialism and democracy as . . . mutually exclusive’.71 The former is introduced precisely to ensure the latter’s survival during a time of unprecedented change. Hu’s view on this point is even clearer: democracy is necessary to the extent that it is one of a number of building blocks needed to establish a Harmonious Socialist Society. Fusing Confucian ideals with Socialist ideology, Hu thinks that democracy’s utility lies in its ability to ‘encourage the full expression of the popular masses’, something which is vital to ensure the ‘organic unity’ between Party leaders and the people is maintained.72 More recently, Yu Zhengsheng, Chairman of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, reiterated the departed leader’s sentiment. For Yu, there is a need now for the new leadership to ‘strictly follow the socialist path of political development with Chinese characteristics’.73 What this entails, among other things, is establishing a system of so-called consultative democracy. According to Yu, this form of democracy does several things: It integrates consultation, oversight, participation and cooperation; closely combines people’s rights to stay informed about, participate in, 127

democracy against itself express views on, and oversee government affairs; embodies the intrinsic requirements of socialist democracy; and accords with the fundamental interests of the people.74

In short, it is the people’s right to oversee the government and the Party’s responsibility to consult the people. Beyond that, and it seems that the CPC retains full authority to lead the country as it sees fit. Similarly, China’s experiment with democracy has had a distinctly Chinese flavour in the sense that there has been a noticeable absence of the type of liberal ideas which have infused Western forays into democracy. Indeed, more than any other value system, it has been Confucianism which has informed how Party leaders approach democracy in China. This is a point reiterated by a number of scholars in the field. For instance, He argues that ‘China has been making efforts to combine Confucianism with democratic values and systems’ for some time.75 There is a great deal of overlap between the two political ideologies.76 Both oppose despotism. Both champion the rights of everyday people. And both encourage active political interest and participation, that is to say, civicism. Despite this, we should not make the mistake by thinking that Confucianism and democracy stand for the same thing. They do not. According to Confucian ideals, for example, there exists a natural hierarchy and individuals must know their place. Children must remain deferential to family elders just as the people must respect and trust in the wisdom of their political leaders. Those who acquire positions of leadership do so for good reason. Parents have years of experience behind them; their actions are guided by the benefit of hindsight. And political leaders have gained the necessary knowledge and virtues which, according to Confucian teachings, are a prerequisite for public office. The meritocratic civil service examination system has thus been used in China to weed out unsuitable individuals well before they attain any potential power.77 For these reasons, democracy is practised very differently in China than in the West. Trust in Party leaders is the default position among the majority of China’s citizens. The thinking is that the CPC knows best. This is why for all but a relatively minor faction of the population, and in all but the most extreme of circumstances, the natural tendency is to remain passive and accepting of Party directives. It is against this backdrop that we can begin to understand the persistence of state-sanctioned repression and the human rights violations which remain an inescapable aspect both of Chinese life and 128

china’s new authoritarianism China’s political system.78 Though democratisation of a sort is under way, China will remain a one-party state that very infrequently tolerates dissent, openly censors the free flow of information, continues to suffer from political and judicial corruption, and readily displays its nationalistic tendencies in its international relations. Due to the Confucian dynamic whereby a strong central government – which continues to oversee all aspects of life in China – is met by what is still a largely passive, apolitical and dependent citizenry, we see how democracy can be used to strengthen – as opposed to subvert – the existing authoritarian system.79 So long as the CPC continues to be outwardly consultative and seen to be stamping out corruption and injustice, those who actually possess the power to demand political change – China’s new middle class – will refuse to rock the boat in which they have been its main economic benefactors.80 And so, from the evidence presented we come to the conclusion that, in China, democracy has been co-opted to secure the ruling cadres’ continued legitimacy. This is not to say that the CPC has not been genuine about its reforms along democratic lines. Rather, it is another example of how democracy can be used, purposely perhaps, to legitimate ends which are not altogether democratic. With the goal of making a more egalitarian and accountable system of socialism a reality, Party leaders have tapped into the population’s desire for democracy. They have given the people the means (limited as they may be) knowing that, in a society where the prominence of Confucian values is on the rise, they will likely reaffirm the CPC’s authority and vision. Only this time, it will be the people’s choice to do so. Bottom-up (democratic) involvement brings top-down (Leninist) legitimacy or, in Maria Markus’ words, ‘legitimation of a hierarchically downwards-oriented system of power and command in the name of a “real” popular sovereignty’.81 To put it bluntly, this is how the CPC is appropriating democracy – using democratic ideas and procedures – to safeguard its own longevity and its continued support among the people.

Inverted Totalitarianism Meets New Authoritarianism This chapter has claimed that in China’s new authoritarianism we can glimpse what our post-democratic future might look like. While the West is not likely to adopt Confucian ideas any time soon, or find itself controlled by a Party-State as such, there may be broader structural developments that may prove revealing. Especially if the 129

democracy against itself system of inverted totalitarianism, already in vogue within the United States, spreads further, there is a good chance that what we are seeing in China we will see in other contexts where the political system is strung somewhere between the poles of totalitarianism and democracy. If inverted totalitarianism gains more popular support, then it could be the start of a subtle reformation in which democracy slowly sets in motion changes which hollow out the core of democracy. This is how democracy can be used to ensure the political legitimacy of a system that is something other than democratic. As such, to draw this and the previous chapter to a close, it is worth explicitly comparing these two systems of political governance to expose the similarities between what is taking place within the United States and the political reforms sweeping across China. This is necessary given the claim being made here is that if America continues down its present inverted totalitarian path, there is much there that will likely resemble the new form of authoritarianism arising in China. So, just what are the parallels that can be drawn between these two political systems? What we can say, before we say anything else, is that neither China nor the United States can really be classified as a democracy now, at least not in the way in which democracy is conventionally classified. Both exhibit and use crucial elements of democracy. Both countries deploy the rhetoric of democracy for political purposes. But in both cases, democracy only explains in part the political predicament that exists. There is, democracy aside, also a crucial element of authoritarianism involved. Authoritarianism has become wedded to democracy’s backbone so that the latter supports the rise of the former. This is what the concepts of new authoritarianism and inverted totalitarianism effectively capture: the hybridised and post-democratic nature of the political systems emerging in China and America. As we would already be aware, America has been confronted with a ‘new despotism’ for some time. This is a despotism which its democratic system has engendered and which ruthlessly concentrates power and suppresses freedom in the formation of a ‘Big Business– Big Government partnership’. While still operating within the confines of a democratic system, fundamental aspects of political life in America have become antithetical to the democracy from which they emerged. The nature of this dynamic – that is, the shift to something in between democracy and totalitarianism – has also been felt in 130

china’s new authoritarianism China. Today, China remains a one-party state. But despite this, and despite the ongoing challenges in relation to human rights, social welfare, legal independence and political pluralism, the country has moved away from its authoritarian past and begun to speak in the language of democracy. In this respect, both political systems share fundamental similarities, much more than either state would care to admit. Both are now, to varying degrees, advocating the freedom of speech, the right to vote, the rule of law and the separation of powers. But the means they employ do not necessarily produce an end that is conducive to democracy in the long run. What is produced is a democracy that is shorn of its characteristic risk and openness. Neither democratic nor totalitarian, they linger somewhere in between. More specifically though, there are perhaps two key intersections between America’s inverted totalitarianism and China’s new authoritarianism that we can identify here as areas deserving of our attention. In the first instance, as Wolin writes, what is distinctive about inverted totalitarianism is how it is able to ‘manage’ democracy without appearing to do so.82 For all intents and purposes, the people are no longer central to the political equation in America; they are directed and disciplined by an insidious network of state-sanctioned economic and political incentives which radically curtail citizens’ capacity to think and act. Not knowing or not caring, the majority of citizens go along with these developments, thinking that because they have been democratically endorsed they are for the good of democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Similarly, though working in the opposing direction, the very nature of China’s new authoritarianism makes it appeal and appealing to democratic sensitivities while remaining trenchantly authoritarian. Democracy is used, more often than not, to make the authoritarian hold on power more effective and legitimate. As such, both the improvements in political participation, especially in inner-party democracy, and in freedom of speech and press are all cast against a backdrop of authoritarianism that in the process seems – and is – more in touch and accountable to the masses. But like inverted totalitarianism, there are internal fail-safe mechanisms in China’s new authoritarianism that automatically dissuade those with the capacity to institute reform from wanting it. In terms of democracy, writes An Chen, China’s middle class represents the country’s best hope given their overall preference for increased ‘economic freedom, political pluralism, the rule of law, and opposition 131

democracy against itself to traditional status hierarchies’.83 Despite this, China’s middle class has characteristically been the most politically apathetic of all the country’s class cleavages. Why has this been the case? The answer, according to Chen and Joseph Cheng, is simple: on the one hand, the CPC has in place mechanisms which severely punish movements whose aim is to challenge its hold on power and, on the other hand, the Chinese middle class is simply unwilling to bite the hand that has fed it so well.84 As long as China’s existing political system continues to produce economic winners among the middle class, it is unlikely to see a direct challenge to its rule from those actually powerful enough to fight back. The second intersection that can be identified between America’s inverted totalitarianism and China’s new authoritarianism is that neither political system came about by revolution. Instead, both are premised on or grafted into what already exists, politically, economically and culturally. Inverted totalitarianism is the fruit of a strong democracy. Therefore, it has its foundation in a democracy and, because of this, it ‘allows free speech, venerates the Constitution, and operates within a two-party system that, theoretically, secures a role for an opposition party’.85 Far from trying to unseat democracy, its goal is to refine and to restore it to its intended glory. But the contradictory logic is that to do this it must ironically resort to non-­ democratic resources. It must, as Howard has said, prevent the majority from doing just anything it pleases. The same, it could be said, applies to China’s new authoritarianism. Yet instead of democracy, it is authoritarianism that is most valued and which the resources of democracy have been deployed to secure. What are we, for instance, to make of the statement made by Wu Bangguo, China’s foremost legislator, at the 2009 National People’s Congress: ‘Western models of democracy, which emphasize multi-party competition for power, the separation of three branches of government, and bicameralism, is not suitable for China’?86 According to this reading at least, it is a clear statement that China’s nascent democratic developments must be viewed squarely against a history and culture of authoritarian rule. Efforts to democratise the country’s key political party, institutions and procedures – at least for the foreseeable future anyway – will always be entwined with its authoritarian past. Those who do not understand this will misunderstand the democratic path that China is currently taking. This, of course, may change in the future. But for now, what the 2005 State Council white paper described seems a more likely predicament: 132

china’s new authoritarianism China’s socialist political democracy shows distinctive Chinese ­characteristics . . . China’s democracy is a people’s democracy under the leadership of the [CPC] . . . China’s democracy is a democracy guaranteed by the people’s democratic dictatorship . . . China’s democracy is a democracy with democratic centralism as the basic organizational principle and mode of operation.87

In the case of China, this is how democracy is being employed to ensure a more accountable and more legitimate form of authoritarian rule.

Notes   1. Arend Lijphart, ‘Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method’, The American Political Science Review (vol. 65, no. 3, 1971), 683.   2. Id., 682.   3. F. F. Ridley, ‘On Comparison as a Practical Activity’, Government and Opposition (vol. 8, no. 1, 1973), 93.  4. Baogang He, ‘Working with China to Promote Democracy’, The Washington Quarterly (vol. 36, no. 1, 2013), 37.  5. Zhengxu Wang, ‘Public Support for Democracy in China’, Journal of Contemporary China (vol. 16, no. 53, 2007), 561; Randall Peerenboom, China Modernizes: Threat to the West or Model for the Rest? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3–4; Bruce Gilley, China’s Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4.   6. Dali L. Yang, ‘China’s Long March to Freedom’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 18, no. 3, 2007), 63; Kerstin Klein, ‘“New Authoritarianism” in China: Political Reforms in the One-Party State’, Telos (vol. 151, 2010), 32; Zhengyuan Fu, Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); W. J. F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis (London: Allen Lane, 1992).  7. Linda Jaivin, ‘A Nobel Affair: Liu Xiaobo’, The Monthly (vol. 63, 2010/11), http://www.themonthly.com.au/print/2928; Peter Foster, ‘Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel: China loses face with boycott of peace prize’, The Telegraph, 9 December, 2010, http://telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/asia/china/8189833; Debbi Wilgoren, Keither. B Richburg and Chris Richards, ‘Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China, honored in absentia by Nobel committee’, The Washington Post, 10 December 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/10/ AR2010121001670.html.  8. Tania Branigan and Jonathan Watts, ‘Top artist Ai Weiwei held amid crackdown’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 April 2011, http:// 133

democracy against itself www.smh.com.au/world/top-artist-ai-weiwei-held-amid-crackdown20110403-1ct97.html; Clifford Coonan, ‘US lambasts Chinese ­repression of dissidents as “trying to stop history”’, The Independent, 11 May 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/uslambasts-chinese-repression-of-dissidents-as-trying-to-stop-history-22 82122.html.   9. Malcolm Moore, ‘Chinese sex tape scandal unearths corruption in Bo Xilai’s Chongqing’, The Telegraph, 26 November 2012, http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9702910/Chinese-sextape-scandal-unearths-corruption-in-Bo-Xilais-Chongqing.html. 10. Frank James, ‘Sen. Harry Reid’s China Stumble; Calls Hu “Dictator”’, tics/ NPR, 19 January 2011, http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpoli​ 2011/01/19/133048158/sen-harry-reids-china-stumble-calls-hu-dicta​ tor. 11. Eric X. Li, ‘The Life of the Party’, Foreign Affairs (vol. 92, no. 1, 2013). 12. Xi Jinping cited in Catherine Mercier, ‘Meet Xi Jinping, China’s new leader’, CBC News, 9 November 2012, http://www.cbc.ca/news/ world/story/2012/11/08/f-who-is-xi-jinping.html. 13. ‘China Censures America on Human Rights’, The Boston Globe, 22 April 2013, http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2013/04/21/ china-criticizes-for-its-human-rights-record/t7KELBo5GdPy1x61 zIr9jK/story.html. 14. Peerenboom, China Modernizes, 1–2. 15. Foster, ‘Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel’. 16. Baogang He, ‘Dilemmas of Pluralist Development and Democratization in China’, Democratization (vol. 3, no. 3, 1996), 288. 17. Robert K. Schaeffer, Red Inc.: Dictatorship and the Development of Capitalism in China, 1949 to the Present (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2012), 159. 18. Ying Ma, ‘China’s Stubborn Anti-Democracy,’ Policy Review (no.141, 2007), http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/arti cle/5850. 19. Andrew J. Nathan, ‘China at the Tipping Point? Foreseeing the Unforeseeable’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 24, no. 1, 2013), 24. 20. David B. H. Denoon, ‘Introduction: Is China’s Transformation Sustainable?’, in David B. H. Denoon (ed.), China: Contemporary Political, Economic, and International Affairs (New York and London: New York University Press, 2007), 2. 21. Daniel A. Bell, China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), ix. 22. Orville Schell, ‘China’s Hidden Democratic Legacy’, Foreign Affairs (vol. 83, no. 4, 2004). 134

china’s new authoritarianism 23. Pei Minxin, ‘How Will China Democratize?’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 18, no. 3, 2007), 56. 24. P. H. Yu, ‘Ten Challenges for China’s New Leader’, American Foreign Policy Interests: The Journal of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy (vol. 35, no. 2, 2013), 75. 25. Henry S. Rowen, ‘When Will the Chinese People Be Free?’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 18, no. 3, 2007), 43–4. 26. Yang, ‘China’s Long March to Freedom’, 60. 27. Klein, ‘“New Authoritarianism” in China’, 36; Yang, ‘China’s Long March to Freedom’, 60; He, ‘Dilemmas of Pluralist Development and Democratization in China’, 289. 28. Yu, ‘Ten Challenges for China’s New Leader’, 77; Cheng Li, ‘TopLevel Reform or Bottom-Up Revolution’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 24, no. 1, 2013), 45. 29. Richard McGregor, ‘5 Myths About the Chinese Communist Party’, Foreign Policy (January/February, 2011), 39. 30. Zhengxu Wang, ‘Hybrid Regime and Peaceful Development in China’, in Sujian Guo (ed.), China’s “Peaceful Rise” in the 21st Century: Domestic and International Conditions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 135–6; Baogang He and Mark E. Warren, ‘Authoritarian Deliberation: The Deliberative Turn in Chinese Political Development’, Perspectives on Politics (vol. 9, no. 2, 2011), 269. 31. Michael Wesley, ‘Made in China’, Griffith Review (vol. 25, 2009). 32. Minxin Pei, ‘China’s Evolution Toward Soft Authoritarianism’, in Edward Friedman and Barrett L. McCormick (eds), What If China Doesn’t Democratise? Implications for War and Peace (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 75–81. 33. Loewenstein, Political Power and the Government Process, 58. 34. Id., 55–6. 35. Id., 56. 36. Li, ‘The Life of the Party’. 37. Klein, ‘“New Authoritarianism” in China’, 45. 38. Cheng Li, ‘Introduction: Assessing China’s Political Development’, in Cheng Li (ed.), China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 9. 39. Ibid. 40. Li, ‘Introduction’, 10. 41. Id., 11. 42. For a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between civil society and democratisation in China, see Elizabeth J. Perry, ‘The Illiberal Challenge of Authoritarian China’, Taiwan Journal of Democracy (vol. 8, no. 2, 2012). 43. Andrew J. Nathan, ‘China’s Political Trajectory: What Are the Chinese Saying?’, in Cheng Li (ed.), China’s Changing Political Landscape: 135

democracy against itself Prospects for Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 39. 44. Yu Keping, ‘Toward an Incremental Democracy and Governance: Chinese Theories and Assessment Criteria’, New Political Science (vol. 24, no. 2 2002); Li, ‘Introduction’, 4. 45. Li, ‘Introduction’, 4; Schell, ‘China’s Hidden Democratic Legacy’. 46. Charter 08, http://www.charter08.com. 47. Zhenhua Su, Hui Zhao and Jingkai He, ‘Authoritarianism and Contestation’, Journal of Democracy (vol. 24, no. 1, 2013), 31. Li, ‘Introduction’, 6; Pei, ‘China’s Evolution Toward Soft 48. Authoritarianism’, 74–5. 49. Wang, ‘Hybrid Regime and Peaceful Development in China’, 134. 50. Li, ‘Introduction’, 3. 51. Klein, ‘“New Authoritarianism” in China’, 30. 52. Id., 30–1; Li, ‘Introduction’, 3–4; Nathan, ‘China’s Political Trajectory,’ 28–9; Yang, ‘China’s Long March to Freedom’, 61. 53. Li, ‘Introduction’, 9. 54. Wen Jiabao cited in Yasheng Huang, ‘Democratize or Die’, Foreign Affairs (vol. 92, no. 1, 2013). 55. C. Fred Bergsten, Charles Freeman, Nicholas R. Lardy and Derk J. Mitchell, China’s Rise: Challenges and Opportunities (Washington, DC: United Book Press. 2008), 57; Yang, ‘China’s Long March to Freedom’, 61; Lisheng Dong, ‘Two Decades of Local Democratic Experiment in China: Developments and Changing Assessments’, Southeast Review of Asian Studies (vol. 32, 2010), 62. 56. Wen Jiabao cited in Michael Wines, ‘Wen Calls for Political Reforms but Sidesteps Details’, The New York Times, 14 March 2012, http:// www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/world/asia/china-wen-jiabao-calls-forpolitical-reform.html. 57. Merle Goldman, ‘Is Democracy Possible?’, in David B. H. Denoon (ed.), China: Contemporary Political, Economic, and International Affairs (New York and London: New York University Press, 2007), 146. 58. Huang, ‘Democratize or Die’. 59. Ibid.; Bergsten et al., China’s Rise, 58; Nathan, ‘China’s Political Trajectory’, 30. 60. Daniel A. Bell, ‘Democracy at the Bottom, Meritocracy at the Top, Experimentation in Between’, China–US Focus, 23 January 2013, http:// www.chinausfocus.com/political-social-development/democracyat-the-bottom-meritocracy-at-the-top-experimentation-in-between/. 61. Yu, ‘Toward an Incremental Democracy and Governance’, 202. 62. Id., 192. 63. Wang, ‘Public Support for Democracy in China’, 571. 64. Confucius cited in Bell, China’s New Confucianism, 9. 136

china’s new authoritarianism 65. Klein, ‘“New Authoritarianism” in China’, 44. 66. Yu Keping, ‘Ideological Change and Incremental Democracy in Reform-Era China’, in Cheng Li (ed.), China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 53–5. 67. Heike Holbig, ‘Ideology after the end of ideology: China and the quest for autocratic legitimation’, Democratization (vol. 20, no. 1, 2013), 69–70. 68. Yu, ‘Ideological Change and Incremental Democracy in Reform-Era China’, 55. 69. Li, ‘Introduction’, 6; Wang, ‘Public Support for Democracy in China’, 573–4; Baogang He, ‘Democratisation: Antidemocratic and democratic elements in the political culture of China’, Australian Journal of Political Science (vol. 27, no. 1, 1992), 128. 70. Bergsten et al., China’s Rise, 58. 71. Wen cited in Nathan, ‘China’s Political Trajectory’, 28. 72. Hu cited in Id., 28–9; Holbig, ‘Ideology after the end of ideology’, 69–70. 73. Yu cited in ‘CPPCC’s new leader rejects Western political systems, champions consultative democracy’, Xinhua, 12 March 2013, http:// news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-03/12/c_132227126.htm. 74. Ibid. 75. Baogang He, ‘Four Models of the Relationship Between Confucianism and Democracy’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy (vol. 37, no. 1, 2010), 24. 76. Shaohua Hu, ‘Confucianism and Western Democracy’, Journal of Contemporary China (vol. 6, no. 15, 1997); Joseph Chan, ‘Democracy and Meritocracy: Toward A Confucian Perspective’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy (vol.3 4, no. 2, 2007). 77. Daniel A. Bell, ‘Democracy in Confucian Societies: The Challenge of Justification’, in Daniel A. Bell, David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya and David Martin Jones, Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 26–7. 78. Li, ‘Introduction’, 1; An Chen, ‘Why does capitalism fail to push China toward democracy?’, in Christopher A. McNally (ed.), China’s Emergent Political Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 147; Peerenboom, China Modernizes, 1–2; Rowen, ‘When Will the Chinese People Be Free?’, 43–4; Gilley, China’s Democratic Future, 54–5. 79. Denoon, ‘Introduction’, 2; Rowen, ‘When Will the Chinese People Be Free?’, 43; Peerenboom, China Modernizes, 245; Daniel A. Bell, David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya and David Martin Jones, Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 27–8. 80. Joseph Y. S. Cheng, ‘Introduction: Economic Growth and New 137

democracy against itself Challenges’, in Joseph Y. S. Cheng (ed.), Challenges and Policy Programs of China’s New Leadership (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2007), 29. 81. Markus cited in Heike Holbig and Bruce Gilley, ‘Reclaiming Legitimacy in China’, Politics and Policy (vol. 38, no. 3, 2010), 412. 82. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 47. 83. Chen, ‘Why does capitalism fail to push China toward democracy?’, 153. 84. Id., 154; Cheng, ‘Introduction’, 29. 85. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 56. 86. Klein, ‘“New Authoritarianism” in China’, 37. 87. Nathan, ‘China’s Political Trajectory’, 30.

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6

Occupy Democracy: Democracy Against Itself and the Global Occupy Movement

There was a time, really for much of 2012, when one could go almost nowhere and not hear the ubiquitous rally cry, ‘We are the 99 per cent’, made famous by the Occupy Movement. Irrespective of language, culture or geography, Occupy’s main premise seemed to strike a chord with people who had never in their lives considered themselves in the same sentence as Wall Street. From those camped out in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, barely a block away from Wall Street proper, to Occupiers gathered in Kuala Lumpar’s Merdeka Square, Sydney’s Martin Place and Hong Kong’s HSBC Main Building, the movement that began as a protest, a US Day of Rage, quickly burst beyond national borders and became a global phenomenon within a matter of weeks. As a representative claim, the 99 per cent was immensely powerful. Accurate or not, intentional or otherwise, the use of the 99 per cent explicitly tapped into democracy’s arsenal to make plain the democratic discontent at the increasingly unrepresentative nature of most advanced democracies. How could mature democracies in the United States and elsewhere claim to be representative of the majority when popularly elected governments continue to relegate the needs of the 99 per cent so that the desires of the 1 per cent can be met? How can the buying and selling of votes, the inequitable distribution of the country’s resources and the widening chasm between rich and poor be consonant with democracy? Far from what has been taking place in the corridors of political power in Washington, London or Canberra in recent years, Occupiers claimed that real democracy is no longer what citizens have become accustomed to. Real democracy is no longer produced through national elections; a vote for the big parties is as good as a vote for the 1 per cent. And so, even as critics began attacking the movement for its apparent lack of demand, Occupiers were clear that their protest was against democracy as much as it was against anything. Yet far from 139

democracy against itself seeking some sort of violent revolution or illegitimate coup, as would typically be expected of anti-democratic movements, Occupy was in reality closer to a global democratic movement. Of course, both Occupiers and their critics contested whether what they were doing was actually democratic in nature. Protest action, as some claimed, is hardly democracy. Setting up camp is neither here nor there, especially in the absence of there being a unified set of political demands. Refusing to engage the political establishment, to dirty one’s hands with horse trading, is the antithesis of what contemporary democrats must do. Some Occupiers agreed, arguing this was precisely why they refused to take their cause to the steps of Congress and Parliament. But for every Occupier who denied they were engaging in democratic action, there was at least one other Occupier who saw the movement as fundamentally democratic. ‘This is what democracy looks like’ was a chant frequently repeated by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors. Though the global movement had no such thing as a single modus operandi, Occupy was indeed typified by its use of a number of central procedures – such as General Assemblies, democratic consensus, horizontalism and the progressive stack – designed to give the people a voice. As keystones, inclusivity and equality enabled any person, party or association – regardless of their nationality, gender, wealth, position or political leaning – to add to the discourse if they were willing to play by the rules. Democratic proceduralism became religiously observed in the many internal ­ meetings and workshops that characterised the nearly 1,000 Occupy encampments spread across every continent (besides Antarctica). In this regard, the spread and structure of the Occupy Movement represented a milestone for global democracy. Unlike the movements and dynamics we have looked at so far in this book, Occupy was not contained to a single party or political faction. Neither was it confined to one country and one democratic system. It was both local and global, or ‘glocal’ as globalisation experts have come to call it.1 This is what set it apart from previous efforts to supersede democracy via the use of democratic means: Occupy became post-national very quickly. True, its critique was most prominently directed against what national democratic governments were doing; the willingness of Barack Obama’s administration to bail out Wall Street being a key example. However, as a network of protestors, Occupy’s spread weaved an intricate web that was both national and global. Within any one country, often dozens of encampments sprouted up during 140

occupy democracy the movement’s peak. Globally, Occupy had a presence in more than eighty countries, though again this was at the height of its popularity. Those who occupied were often not citizens of the countries of their occupation; many were migrants, refugees, workers or members of the global diaspora. The movement did not delimit franchise on the basis of nationality. And it did not establish hierarchies premised on gender, wealth and social status. Each encampment was equal but also unique: each established its own agenda and spoke to the concerns of its own participants. Loose as this network of protestors and encampments was, though, Occupy kept unified. Driven by a shared disdain for the machinations of what was taking place on Wall and Main streets, the movement was always more than merely a disparate grouping of dots spread across the globe. Its common structure and approach ensured that Occupy would operate as a global and democratic collective. From Tunis and Bogota to Ottawa and Barcelona, Occupiers were bound together by this common structure and approach. A diverse range of concerns from a diverse range of people unified through this global democratic movement. Together, they were able to spotlight the unrepresentative and inequitable practices prevalent in many of the world’s advanced democracies. For these reasons, the Occupy Movement was, other things aside, a new take on what we have been studying thus far. Though it continues to be many things to many people, our analysis will focus on this one aspect: Occupy as a post-national example of how d ­ emocracy can work against itself. The novelty of this democratic movement was that it transgressed traditional state borders and captured the popular sentiment on a global scale. It was not merely restricted to criticising one party or one democracy. Nor did it restrict itself in the way that state-based movements often do in terms of membership. Relocating democracy – and democracy against itself – to the postnational realm thus makes for interesting analysis. For too long our democratic imaginaries have been tied to the nation-state system: to Athens, Weimar, the United States and China. Democracy only works in these examples because sovereignty makes government possible, is the argument. In turn, democrats who have wanted to use democratic means to de-legitimate and ultimately supersede democracy have had to work within national confines. Occupy ­ showed us that this is no longer the case. Post-national democratic configurations, divorced from territorial restraints, can emerge – and not just to advance democracy’s cause but also to undermine it. 141

democracy against itself In this final chapter, we explore how the global Occupy Movement can be considered a case of post-national democracy against itself. The argument that will be developed in the following pages may however be a little unconventional. Simply put, the chapter contends that Occupy did not succeed in bringing down democracy or, more accurately, the types of commonplace practices among leading politicians and their political parties within the countries in which it set up its camps. This goes without saying as, for many Occupiers, undermining democracy was never their goal. Even though the movement emerged in response to, and as a condemnation of, the flailing state of democracy, in the end Occupy was more a lived statement of what democracy could be than a concerted attempt to bring democracy to an end. But the chapter’s claim is that, even on this second count, the Occupy Movement ultimately failed to achieve its objective. Specifically, by analysing its very structure and approach, the chapter will argue that Occupy was a democratically unsustainable movement. While we cannot ignore the role that exogenous factors played in bringing occupation to an end, endogenous determinants were just as important. Few who were involved with the movement could deny that its greatest strengths – its inclusivity and equality – turned out to be one of its greatest problems. Observers have reported on just how Occupy’s excessively democratic and inclusive procedures were observed, even to the point where progress gave way to inertia. Radical and fundamentalist factions were given voice in General Assemblies and workshops, despite advocating agendas and methods in contravention of Occupy’s otherwise democratic and peaceful mission. Committed and knowledgeable participants were slowly driven away or left frustrated by the movement’s lack of clear direction. That the state did intervene in many encampments does not therefore take away from the prospect that this democratic experiment may well have brought about its own demise given enough time. This is why the Occupy Movement, as a lived experiment of a re-imagined democracy, was susceptible to being undone by its own constituents and processes. In its very democratic structure and approach, the seeds of the movement’s own destruction were already being sown even before the police set about tearing down camps and evicting occupants. That, the chapter contends, may turn out to be one of the lesser explored of Occupy’s many enduring legacies. 142

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From National to the Post-National: Global Democracy Against Itself Before we turn our attention to Occupy’s democratic structure and approach, we should begin by discussing the novelty of the Occupy Movement – not just as a form of post-national democracy but, more so, as a form of post-national democracy against itself. Neither forms of democracy, it should be made clear, are commonplace. For one thing, democracy has been wedded almost exclusively to the nation-state for centuries. Even before the Peace of Westphalia rearticulated the way we think about the world, scholars and statesmen were already of the opinion that democracy was only possible in the context of a ‘clearly demarcated territory’ which could claim ‘juridico-political sovereignty’ over all individuals and affairs within its boundaries.2 Today, the literature on democracy almost always presupposes the nation-state as the natural, even the only, site of democracy.3 As Daniele Archibugi makes clear, the position held by most political scientists is that ‘the practice of democracy could live and prosper only within the boundaries of a state’.4 Only very recently has this assumption begun to change. Even so, the idea of there being some type of functioning global democratic configuration continues to be commonly ‘dismissed as utopian’, in Archibugi’s words. The reason behind this relates not merely to the ‘close historical ties’ that democracy has had with the nation-state.5 It also relates to the fact that democracy’s existence has traditionally been premised on certain preconditions being met in the first instance. These conditions, as Keane sets out, generally fall into four categories.6 First and most obvious is the need for a sovereign territorial state that can, at the very minimum, provide for its citizens’ physical security. The second prerequisite for a democracy is a political culture which is broadly susceptible to a democratic ethos, that is, to open and free debate, to frequent elections and a parliamentary system that ultimately is there to represent the people. A third requirement is a ‘national identity’ of sorts where individuals share a common language and history. A group that is too fragmented will be averse to engaging and working with each other. Finally, according to Keane, a democracy is dependent on the existence of an economy strong enough to ensure the people do not have to spend the bulk of their energies worrying about survival. Only where there is sufficient wealth can individuals ‘take an interest in public affairs’. In all four 143

democracy against itself categories, the sovereignty possessed by the nation-state is a central lynchpin. Sovereignty makes possible the requirements needed for democracy to germinate and develop. Unfortunately, as scholars of international relations know, the international realm is commonly considered to be devoid of these requirements. Typically defined by its anarchic quality, the international system lacks any authoritative government capable of doing the types of things which have come easily, or at least easier, to national governments. Without its needed prerequisites, though, democracy has never been fully able to shed its statist shackles. As the world moves forward, spurred on by twentyfirst-century developments, democracy continues along more or less as it always has. Today, ‘[o]nly democratic citizens’, writes William Connolly, ‘remain locked behind the bars of the state’.7 This has not been without its consequences. In one sense, the world still remains a construct of a set of territorially bounded states. It is in these states where the bulk of the world’s population resides, where communities, governments and laws are established. Despite this, recent socio-political developments, particularly in neo-liberal capitalist globalisation, have increasingly begun to challenge the sovereignty of the nation-state system. As Bob Jessop makes clear, ‘there is a general trend towards the de-statisation of politics’.8 In all domains of life, we are seeing ‘official (typically national) state apparatuses’ slowly eroded and challenged by other ‘official, parastatal and non-governmental’ groupings which have come to command a say over how political decisions should be made. The ambit of political power once monopolised by the state has become postnational: dispersed among an array of sub- and trans-national actors and conglomerates.9 As such, how a nation-state and its citizens conduct their domestic affairs no longer rests solely on the decisions and aspirations of the political community involved. Power-brokers geographically removed from the locations in question, concerned with only profit margins and the interests of their shareholders, can exert disproportionate influence and sway the decisions of local governments. Citizens and their elected representatives have had to be content to play second fiddle to these actors in a world where global interests intersect with localised concerns. But what happens to democracy when local, state-based political mechanisms, and their constituents, have to give way to the interests of global organisations and corporations – many of which can be labelled as anti-democratic in structure if not in aspiration? When democracy continues to be bound to the nation-state at a time when 144

occupy democracy very little else is, can we say that it is still effectively giving voice to the people? Is democracy still an effective system of governance in a globalising world? Increasingly, the answer to these questions is no. For Keane, such trends as the concentration of power in the hands of global firms and the hesitations of parliamentary mechanisms in the face of globalising markets; the disproportionate power of a few states within global bodies such as the United Nations and the G7/G8/G20; and the growth of supra-national institutions, agencies and networks which are wholly unaccountable to citizens and their elected representatives

not only threaten the nation-state but also the state of democracy.10 In short, political participation is skewed to the rich and powerful in the global realm, while authority remains at best undemocratic and unrepresentative. The paradox is this: whereas de-territorialised organisations and corporations can exert influence over how national decisions are made, regardless of which nations these decisions take place in, democratic citizens can only work through the formal structures within their country. Even though democratic processes are increasingly undermined by transnational actions, democracies are denied the right to hold post-national actors to account. Global institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank are for the most part not responsive to citizens within the state. That protest action against these institutions is among the most heavily policed is an indication that we do not consider them subject to the same level of democratic scrutiny.11 Citizens and states are expected merely to conform to these transnational pronouncements – regardless of what they may have democratically decided for themselves. In the context of the Global Financial Crisis, this has led nationstates to subject their own citizens to austerity programmes in order to meet the conditions set by international organisations. No matter what citizens say they want, Marianne Maeckelbergh writes that ‘[n]ation-states are increasingly incapable of representing the interests of their citizens’.12 The reasons are simple. ‘National governments are tied to neoliberal economic policies that erode social rights.’ The slide into recession has only made it easier for institutions such as the World Bank and bodies like the European Union to make their demands heard and respected. To be bailed out, states have no other choice but to follow these external recommendations. The problem is that when they do this democracy is frequently bypassed. For the 145

democracy against itself citizen, as Maeckelbergh lays out, this means that ‘no matter who you vote for, no matter who is “representing” you’, your voice will inevitably be edged out by capitalism’s deafening hum. With democratic outcomes undercut by external stakeholders, whose single vote counts more than the majority decision put together, it is little wonder that individuals are turning to other avenues. The erosion of democracy by transnational actors has led many to act outside of traditional democratic processes. Using the same transnational flows that undermined their autonomy in the first place, people are taking to the streets to voice their discontent locally while, at the same time, coordinating resistance on a global scale. That more and more people now see ‘street protests as the only means to voice their opinions’ speaks both to the crisis of democracy and to the shift from national to global politics.13 The truth is that globalisation has altered democratic politics to the point where traditional conceptions, practices and institutions of democracy have become ill-equipped to accommodate transnational political interests. Democracy struggles to empower national citizens to voice their concerns in a world of porous political communities and incessant cross-border flows.14 Democracy is no longer sufficient or able to fulfil its promise. Consequently, a growing ‘democratic deficit’ has emerged in both the domestic and international realms.15 The erosion of sovereign borders by the processes of globalisation has resulted in the erosion of the two ‘As’: autonomy and authority. Without them, national governments are beholden not so much to the citizens who elected them into power. They become subject to foreign governments, global institutions and transnational corporations. Yet unlike democratically elected governments, which can be held to account and voted out of office, there are few democratic checks and balances in place for citizens to influence these external actors. Decisions are often sprung on these communities and individuals with barely any prior consultation or negotiation. Troubling as these developments are, the prospect that democracy should or indeed can be relocated from the domestic to the global realm has perplexed scholars and policy-makers. More than a few have remained trapped by the logic of the nation-state, even though what they are confronting defies many of the parameters on which the modern state system was founded. For instance, the popular view among scholars is that whatever shape democracy does eventually take at the global level, it should as a matter of course follow the 146

occupy democracy mould set by democracy at the domestic level. As Terry Macdonald and Raffaele Marchetti make clear, One key challenge confronting a design project of this kind is that many of the institutions fundamental to state-based democracies – such as centralized ‘sovereign’ agencies of public power, territorial constituencies, inclusive public deliberation, and electoral representation – would be extremely difficult to implement on a global scale.16

Both Macdonald and Marchetti have in their own work offered alternatives to this predominantly Westphalian mindset. Yet their point still remains: even though national democracies are the problem – in that they are incapable of responding to global challenges and interests – they nevertheless remain the only form of democracy the world has really known. Conceptualising post-national democracy is without precedent. As a result, it is natural to fall back on familiar terrain. For all its innovation, this was effectively what the Warsaw Declaration of 2000 reiterated, namely, democracy should be considered the predominant system of government ‘within the Westphalian nation-state system’ in the twenty-first century.17 Because of this, the Declaration added that democracy promotion must be regarded as a legitimate international norm and an avenue to establish more national democracies. This is not to say that new proposals have not tried to break away from democracy’s Westphalian heritage. They have. Spurred on by the global developments of the twenty-first century, a range of scholars, policy-makers and heads of state have been proposing institutions and procedures of democratic deliberation whose aim is to do justice to the ever-intersecting local, national and international interests that dictate contemporary politics. Perhaps the most well-known of these fall under the umbrella concept of cosmopolitan democracy. Here, the idea is that national citizens also begin to see themselves as global citizens. In turn, global society must progressively transform into ‘an international system . . . populated by institutions that both secure order and are democratically accountable in direct fashion’ to its global citizenry.18 Among other things, cosmopolitan democracy toys with such ideas as the creation of a representative world parliament or, failing that, more democratic institutions and procedures that can work in but also beyond the level of the state.19 Quite simply, cosmopolitan democracy speaks to the global democratic deficit by ensuring that ‘citizens, wherever they are located in the world, have a voice, input and political representation in i­nternational affairs’.20 147

democracy against itself Given the incapacity of national democracies to respond effectively to post-national political problems, citizens must not be left without recourse. In the logic of cosmopolitan democracy, they will not. National citizens will be able to hold to account those with the power to affect their lives – wherever they may be. But however we see these developments and their corresponding challenges for democracy, the ‘hollowing-out’ of statehood as a result of our post-national political realities also has important implications for how democracies work against themselves.21 The call to extend democracy globally means that the prospect of democracy against itself – which has largely been presumed a consequence of democratic failure within the state – must too be thought of in more post-national terms. And so, if efforts to extend democracy to the international realm were not complicated enough, we now have to grapple with the added challenge of how to conceptualise and approach democratic failure beyond the state. For if democracy against itself has attended almost all democracies within the state then it is conceivable that the same prospect might equally come to plague any configuration that democracy takes when re-imagined on a global scale. This is why scholars of post-national democracy must now ask anew the same set of questions they have been asking all along about the possibility of democratic politics beyond the state. Only this time, the answers they provide will need to focus on how post-national democracy can work against itself and in what ways. Accordingly, questions such as: How is democracy to operate in the new postnational environment? Who are the demos – the citizens – capable of participating in these democratic practices and organisations? What institutions and procedures can most effectively include a diverse range of stakeholders while excluding others? To what extent do global dissent and mass social movements constitute and affect these and other democratic configurations? These types of questions – fundamental to the institution of global democracy – are the very questions that scholars of democratic failure need to ask and begin to answer: How can democrats and democracies work against themselves in our new post-national reality? Who are the demos who can commit these acts against democracy? What institutions and procedures can they use to do so? Of course, the answers to these questions will depend to a large degree on the type of post-national democracy being analysed. Democratic failure beyond the state will look quite different, and 148

occupy democracy be more or less likely, depending on whether one examines cosmopolitan democracy, stakeholder democracy, a league of democracies, international democratic institutions, or global social movements with democratic ends in mind. Part of the problem any scholar of post-national democracy will confront is in clarifying just what they envision democracy will look like outside the confines of the nation-state. The same problems will attend any attempts to theorise post-national democracy against itself. In the present chapter, our discussion will do this by focusing only on one type of post-national democracy: the global Occupy Movement. By carefully setting out Occupy as a global social movement with democratic ends in mind, we will then explore what made it susceptible to collapsing under the weight of its own participants’ demands and the excessively democratic procedures that came to paralyse the movement.

Global Social Movements and the Case of Occupy By now, it should be clear that democracy as practised within the confines of the nation-state will not be the same thing as democracy conceptualised on a more global scale. Where time-honoured institutions and procedures were once able to channel the popular will into popular rule in the domestic realm, the processes of globalisation have made new forms of representation and participation necessary. Issues are now glocal and affected individuals are geographically dispersed. More than ever, writes Roland Bleiker, ‘democratic participation cannot be fully institutionalized’.22 If anything, as he continues, ‘in a global context that lacks democratic accountability and institutions that might anchor and regulate popular participation in decision-making procedures’, individuals have to operate outside of traditional democratic processes and institutions if they wish to be heard. Global social movements have become, in the absence of a universally recognised democratic system, an avenue where likeminded individuals can find voice and influence power irrespective of their geography and status. Global social movements have been around for decades in one form or another. According to Simon Tormey, they first came to prominence during the 1970s and ’80s when ‘movements against war, the nuclear bomb, environmental degradation, race and identity discrimination’ set about making dissident voices heard.23 What set them apart then, as now, is the ability they had to operate outside the political establishment. Citing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 149

democracy against itself Tormey thus likens these movements to ‘rhizomatic’ networks that operate below the surface. They emerge and then subside. But even when they may seem defeated, movements of this nature continue ‘readying themselves for the next opportunity to push through the surface and emerge in unpredictable ways’.24 What makes them capable of doing this is the ability these networks have to splinter without triggering dissolution. Unlike nation-states, which are defined by the national borders and identity which they have set for themselves, movements are flexible and dynamic. That they evolve and take on a new face does not mean they have ceased to exist. Of course, social movements can and sometimes do implode. Yet without a ‘predetermined start or end’, the end of a movement may not be the end as such.25 A new rupture may emerge and, with it, a new beginning. When we think back to past social movements, such as the anti-globalisation protests in Seattle and Melbourne, for example, these are certainly some of the character traits that come to mind. The Occupy Movement ‘is part of this story’, writes Tormey.26 Occupy is rhizomatic in that it emerged from below, from the street level up. Just when we thought that representative democracy had stalled, subterranean forces united to remind the world that democracy is not solely beholden to politicians, elections and parliaments. Naturally, there were some who compared Occupy to a mob, and a self-destructive one at that.27 With no leader and in the absence of an enumerated set of principles, Occupy risked becoming everything to everyone. As with past efforts in participatory democracy, some commentators feared that mob mentality would soon transform majority rule into the tyranny of the majority. Many forecast that a debilitating short-sightedness would lead to poor political decisions and finally result in a system that is no better than certain types of authoritarianism. This version of Occupy’s story, it should be noted, is disputed. But as a rhizomatic network, Occupy was open to different interpretations. Stories of how it emerged and then subsided in messy and unpredictable ways added to the overall story of the movement. But more on the end of Occupy later. For now, let us say a few more words on the birth of Occupy as a global social movement. Like anti-globalisation protests before it, Occupy drew from globalisation’s arsenal of tools to unite the people at Wall Street and, from there, disseminate its message worldwide. We know that Occupy began specifically as OWS. It originated as a call sent out via Twitter 150

occupy democracy by Adbusters, a Canadian magazine, to ‘flood’ lower Manhattan on 17 September 2011. There, Occupiers were called to ‘set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street’.28 Few thought it would take off, let alone last. But through Facebook and the Twittersphere, word spread and disenfranchised people from all over the country began flooding in. At first, only several hundreds gathered. But soon, hundreds turned into thousands.29 One encampment became dozens and, shortly after, the movement sprouted up in countries and continents far removed from the concrete park in lower Manhattan where it all began. The globality of Occupy and the speed with which it spread became proof that the movement could capitalise on the new global reality rather than be imprisoned by it. Aside from that, Occupy was also distinct from a political party or at least a political party in the traditional sense. Occupy was a movement that arose to condemn the corporate greed and lack of democratic representation in countries where wealth and democracy had been taken as granted.30 As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote in 2011, Occupiers quickly ‘made clear that [their] indignation against corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep’.31 However, just as real and deep was ‘the lack – or failure – of political representation’ felt to be hollowing out democracy in the United States and elsewhere. At some point, the two concerns coalesced and became one. The sentiment driving Occupy was this: however influential democrats may think their votes are, citizen votes will never carry the power to challenge the wealthy and powerful.32 To the contrary, democracy has become a tool used by the wealthy and powerful to fool everyday citizens into thinking that they remain in control when, in fact, the opposite is true. This very point has already been made by many leading Left intellectuals, including Wolin and Giroux. It is democracy which provides safe haven for powerful individuals and wealthy corporations who defy the rule of the majority. What is more, till now, all of us have been implicated in this downward spiral.

Democracy and the Global Occupy Movement At this point, it is important that we do not make the mistake of labelling Occupy as a revolutionary movement, something which is easy to do given its claims. There is nothing about it that sought to defeat and replace power. Occupy did not want to substitute one unrepresentative regime with another.33 If anything, as a number 151

democracy against itself of ­occupiers have suggested, the movement was perhaps closer to a gesture in democracy than it was to anything else. For Wendy Brown, who was an ardent supporter of Occupy, what was produced in encampments all over the world was a new ‘modestly democratic’ ethos.34 Being an ethos meant there was nothing about the creation of new institutions or the cultivation of viable political leaders that could challenge at the next national election. Democracy in Occupy simply implied, in John Buell’s assessment, ‘a radically democratic way to embrace a world of difference and flux’.35 As such, if it wanted for anything it was, in the words of one Occupy Oakland participant, for ‘everyone to take the reins of their own government’.36 This sounds straightforward. However, just how are all individuals – many of whom are not citizens and are not enfranchised in the countries of their residence – to take the reins of their own ­government? And by doing so would Occupy risk becoming less a democratic ethos than a political platform to win back government? In their commentary, Hardt and Negri offer us an answer to these questions. Yes, Occupy was an expression of the popular dissatisfaction with existing systems of democratic representation. And yes, Occupy wanted to enfranchise all individuals regardless of their race, nationality, wealth or status. But it would do this not by submitting itself to the rules of the game. Only by living the alternative would Occupy realise that alternative. As Hardt and Negri state, the ‘clearest clues’ of Occupy’s democratic aspirations ‘lie in the internal organization of the movements themselves – specifically, the way the encampments experiment with new democratic practices’.37 It is in these camps where we will see what distinguished Occupy from former global social movements. The first and probably most distinct feature is the way that Occupy managed to balance order with chaos. As a global network of occupiers, it drew participants from all quarters and, together, they engaged in mass protests without being confined to a set of concrete demands. Added to this fact was the lack of a leader or leadership to steer the movement, both locally and globally.38 The movement was characteristically leaderless. ‘Do not wait for the encampments, then, to develop leaders or political representatives’, write Hardt and Negri: ‘No Martin Luther King, Jr. will emerge from the occupations of Wall Street and beyond.’39 Instead of one leader or even a set of leaders, Occupy was an open forum. All voices and all opinions were welcome. Any individual could lead. It was a defining characteristic of camps worldwide that all individuals could participate if they were willing to subject themselves to the 152

occupy democracy rules of the movement, even those holding extremist views. Naturally, disagreements and arguments did ensue. Occupiers from all walks of life came together and were forced to negotiate their differences and prejudices in one physical space. At times, this inclusiveness left the movement exposed to infighting and pettiness. To many of its critics, Occupy was no different to a rudderless vessel lacking in direction and endpoint. There was no order, no command and control and no long-term objectives. It was essentially a structure-less structure. But none of this happened by accident. Occupy’s structure, which participants would know as imposing, even as excessive, was purposely imposed to produce the structure-less-ness that resulted. Under the broad methodological umbrella known as Horizontalism, Occupy set in motion a number of key conventions and procedures to which all participants were subject. These include the democratic method of consensus, the General Assembly and the progressive stack. The objective of these conventions and procedures was to ensure that a modicum of order existed and that it be conducive to the movement’s mission to live out democracy each and every day. While not new, Horizontalism was employed by Occupy to put into practice its egalitarian, networked and decentralised democratic ethos.40 Maeckelbergh argues that this method is premised on four tenets. First, as she claims, Horizontalism is not tied to representation as practised within most representative democracies. For one, representation can be hierarchical in that the citizenry cede their power to a representative figure who then acts on their behalf. Horizontalism is not this. Second, Horizontalism has no allegiance to any territorial space or political institution. It operates beyond the nation-state and is not confined solely to official institutions of representation. It can pop up and subside organically. Third, Horizontalism does not strive for uniformity amid diversity. The objective of this method is to unsettle the artificially constructed uniformity that marks most democratic societies for something that better reflects the diversity of reality. The fourth tenet of Horizontalism is equality, an objective which must remain the subject of continuous struggle. Politically, Horizontalism gave Occupy the means to challenge ‘the state of politics conventionally defined’. As Marina Sitrin points out about Occupy’s use of Horizontalism: There is no desire to take over the state or to create a new party. The Occupy movements reject this form of representative politics, focusing instead on people taking control of their own lives and expanding the 153

democracy against itself democratic spaces in which they live and work . . . But democracy is the crux of Occupy politics, and democracy practiced in such a way so as to upend vertical political relations and expand horizontal ones.41

Consensus decision-making is one process to which Occupy frequently resorted to realise horizontal political relations in practice. Writing in the edited collection Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, L. A. Kauffman describes the practice as ‘a creative thinking process’.42 Citing an explanation from OWS, Kauffman outlines the process in this way: ‘When we vote, we decide between two alternatives. With consensus, we take an issue, hear the range of enthusiasm, ideas and concerns about it, and synthesize a proposal that best serves everybody’s vision.’ Especially where large groups are gathered, consensus ensures that decisions are not made until or unless all those who want a say have had a say. In this way, whatever the final decisions end up being, it provides better assurance that as many people as possible remain ‘invested and involved’.43 The point of difference may seem minute when compared to majority rule. Yet in consensus decision-making, the minority view is not forgotten or marginalised. To the contrary, any decision reached through consensus decision-making processes should have taken minority concerns into account as well as having left the door open for further discussion. All this requires order and structure. Far from the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ so often thought to have plagued Occupy, ‘there was often so much structure that meetings began with an overview of the hand signals and decision-making steps’, recounts Manissa McCleave Maharawal.44 Like any good democratic experiment, Occupy required certain things to function and succeed. If franchise and inclusivity were what it was after, then it had to have a set of institutions and procedures through which the popular will could be channelled in an effective manner. With Occupy, these requirements were met by the General Assembly and the method of the Progressive Stack. Talk of the General Assembly inevitably invites comparisons with the United Nations. However, when it came to Occupy, the General Assembly had less to do with uniting nations than with uniting a band of disparate individuals. More accurately, as Nathan Schneider contends, Occupy’s General Assembly represented ‘a hodgepodge of procedures and hand signals with origins as various as Quakerism, ancient Athens, the indignados of Spain (some of whom were present) and the spokescouncil of the 1999 anti-globalization move154

occupy democracy ment’.45 The Assembly was a direct reflection of what the people who gathered wanted. There were no intermediaries and no representatives. To have a say was to be there and to be vocal. Maple Razsa, an American anthropologist who spent time at Occupy Slovenia in Ljubliana, recounts how one General Assembly in late 2011 unfolded: A voice from my left nominates Marko, 31, to facilitate the proceedings by asking, ‘You’ve never been moderator, right?’ Indeed, as he recites aloud the rules that structure the assembly – as is done at the beginning of each gathering – Marko struggles. The crowd of 50, now in a tight circle, teases him when he forgets the second of only three agenda items considered at each assembly: camp logistics, workshop reports, and ­miscellaneous. Marko reminds everyone that the assembly does not decide the content of the workshops (delavnice) – that is the autonomous prerogative of the workshops themselves. When Marko pauses too long, others in our circle call out the rules: Raise your hand to speak, wait to be acknowledged by the moderator, respect the expression of others, and, if you have already spoken, defer to those who have not yet had a chance to express themselves. Do not engage in dialogue with others, especially if this means criticizing the proposals of others, but instead propose your own action – and only an action that you yourself are willing to participate in and help organize. Be concrete. Propose the idea for a workshop and announce when and where it will meet. ‘So, in short,’ continues Marko, catching his stride, ‘its direct democracy. Everyone present participates.’46

Though Razsa’s account was specific to Occupy Slovenia, many if not all encampments followed these procedures. Most if not all also practised the method of the Progressive Stack, which gave marginalised individuals and politically unpopular perspectives priority over those whose opinions had already been heard. Here, it was the women, those of colour, foreign residents, the unemployed and the socially outcast who were frequently invited to speak first, above and over those from ‘traditionally privileged’ backgrounds.47 But whoever it was, no one was given more than their due. As the crowd reminded Marko, once you have had your say, let others have theirs. In other words, ‘step up’ then ‘step back’.48 This was the nature of the democracy Occupy promoted from the ground up.

Democracy Against Itself and the Global Occupy Movement For these reasons, those who observed and participated in the Occupy Movement would know it largely as a concerted effort to 155

democracy against itself stimulate and revitalise democracy on a global scale. But more than just any effort to stimulate and revitalise democracy, Occupy fronted a democratic critique of democracy.49 That is to say, Occupy was not an anti-democratic revolution or coup. It sought to practise the type of democracy it saw lacking in reality. For Occupy participants Nick Couldry and Natalie Fenton, the movement not only helped expose ‘democracies that aren’t working . . . as democracies’, it provided a forum for millions to ‘explore new ways of experiencing the general will’.50 The words that Judith Butler spoke at one Occupy gathering in the United States are worth repeating. For her, those who occupied were putting on an ‘unprecedented display of democracy and popular will’.51 Moreover, as she continued, those who occupy were in effect ‘making democracy, enacting the phrase “We the people!”’ But the symbolism of the encampments, for as long as they ­continued, begged an important question: ‘If democracy – that is, the democracy we have been given – is staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of democracy obsolete?’52 What the question asks, in other words, is whether the 99 per cent should act to democratically challenge the mainstream practices of representative democracy? For Jodi Dean, one of America’s leading voices on the political Left and an outspoken supporter of Occupy, the answer is simple. In her essay ‘Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong’, she argues that democracy and democratisation is now less and less worthy of the people’s patronage.53 The problem is not so much with democracy as with what it has become synonymous: elections, campaign finance and capitalism. For these reasons, Occupy must challenge democracy. It cannot be reduced to democracy as it has come to be commonly conceived and practised. ‘Democratization skips the actual fact of occupation’, argues Dean, as it rearticulates ‘the movement in terms of a functional political system’.54 But ‘[i]f the system were functional,’ she continues, ‘people wouldn’t be occupying all over the country – not to mention the world’. It is precisely because the system of representative democracy no longer works that occupation is necessary. The obvious danger with a movement that seeks to repudiate democracy is that it can progressively reject democratic procedures as well as ends. Radical opinions can give way to extremist ones. There is no better illustration of this than Jodi Dean. Though a champion of radical democracy, she ends her essay by insisting that ‘occu156

occupy democracy pation is not a democratic strategy; it is a militant, divisive tactic that expresses the fundamental division on which capitalism depends.’55 Worryingly, Dean’s is not a minority position among supporters of Occupy. As Alasdair Roberts documents, an October 2011 survey of occupants at Zuccotti Park revealed that approximately 30 per cent would favour the use of violence to realise the objectives of the movement.56 Even more problematic, almost two-thirds of participants at Occupy Chicago believed that ‘violence against the government was sometimes justified’. The procedural inclusivity of the movement meant that these voices could not be excluded from the discussion. As a result, the movement left itself fundamentally open – even vulnerable – to these militant perspectives.57 On more than one occasion, for example, we know that militant factions like the Black Bloc managed to convince fellow Occupiers to join them in rioting and the destruction of public amenities. One incident in particular, in late 2011, saw protestors in black balaclavas take to the streets during a peaceful Occupy Oakland demonstration to destroy shops and banks. Fortunately, violent outbreaks were relatively infrequent occurrences. On the whole, Occupy was a peaceful phenomenon which used democratic means to reach an alternative democratic end. Despite numbers suggesting that a good proportion of its participants believed that violence should not be excluded as a potential tactic, the vast majority did not actually jettison democratic procedures. To the contrary, they observed them with religious diligence. Even to the point where Occupy’s procedural equality and inclusivity became extreme and counter-productive, participants did their best to balance means with ends. In some ways, many argued, the means were the ends given that the movement was a lived experiment in participatory and inclusive democracy freed from the restraints of elections and national borders. But what we know of Occupy, from its many meetings and institutional regulations, was that it was a fundamentally taxing exercise in self-rule. What made it radical and novel also made it sluggish and alienating. As a democratic innovation that would not exclude, Occupy soon found itself paralysed by the very institutions and procedures that were designed to ensure its survival. Even had the state not intervened, Occupy might have nonetheless ground itself to a halt if given the time. This makes Occupy more than anything else a novel take on democracy against itself. There are a number of facets to this claim. For instance, any committed participant would have experienced firsthand the often 157

democracy against itself chaotic and over-long assemblies and councils that were never completely safe from ‘centrifugal forces’.58 Participants were free to form their own factions, splinter off into new movements or, if they finally lost patience with the lack of direction, to leave Occupy altogether. The ideal of consensus decision-making, even when practised in conjunction with the Progressive Stack, did not stop the ‘stubborn or disruptive’ from taking over proceedings.59 In the movement’s ‘raucous and dysfunctional’ Spokes Council, Todd Gitlin described the proceedings in this way: ‘By December, Spokes Council meetings were so chaotic that one activist, Meaghan Linick, likened them to Jerry Springer shows. “There are a lot of angry people,” she told me. A few screamers – paranoids was another term – were blocking serious proposals.’60 Many, whether too infuriated by what the movement had descended into or too busy to commit the long hours necessary to move a proposal forward, began giving up. Toward the end, only hardliners or those with nowhere else to go remained. Opportune or not, Roberts therefore surmises that this ‘experiment with Horizontalism was terminated before it could be seen to fail’.61 As participants of Occupy Pittsburgh, Jackie Smith and Bob Glidden witnessed how these developments slowly corroded and debilitated Occupy’s radical democratic promise. In particular, they observed the emergence of an organic hierarchy in the camp where those who ‘maintained continuous presence’ – i.e. those who lived the mission most – assumed a higher or more authoritative presence to those who did not.62 In contrast to Occupy’s stated refusal to empower permanent leaders, Smith and Glidden noticed that in reality power and authority were monopolised by a permanent minority. Though this inequality was not made explicit – after all, no one had elected these individuals into power – it did pervade camp life. More concerning still, it was not the worst off of the 99 per cent who ended up having the most opportunities to lead. Women and the uneducated were marginalised in decision-making forums; many were bullied or co-opted into following the decisions of others. Indeed, as Smith and Glidden recount, ‘[a]s the length of the meetings increased, many either capitulated or left, allowing decisions to be made by the hold-outs left standing at the end’.63 There were simply not enough hours in the day, and certainly not enough popular will, to attend all the General Assemblies and still plan and carry out other activities. And even when particular working groups did manage to propose potentially workable initiatives, they lamented 158

occupy democracy that ‘there was an imbalance which favored those speaking against proposals, and belligerent, stubborn and militant individuals’ who refused to relinquish the floor.64 With no way to enforce decisions or exclude disruptive and aggressive influences, Occupy was subject to the whims of the strong and vocal. When that began occurring, the movement’s radical democratic potential was slowly snuffed out and replaced with something more akin to a fledgling authoritarianism. Democratic openness began to induce a democratically endorsed oligarchy. But however corrosive these internal forces got, we know that in the end it was the state which dealt the movement its most deadly blow. Systematically, the police intervened and evicted Occupiers from their encampments one by one. We cannot ignore this exogenous influence in the movement’s ultimate demise. Yet far too much of the popular and scholarly attention has been paid to what the state did to bring Occupy to an end. Few if any studies have analysed the internal democratic iterations that also had a hand in grinding the movement into the ground. This is why for Roberts it is crucial that when we look back on Occupy we understand that it died by ‘an apparent suicide, killed by its own distaste for democratic politics’.65 The point that this chapter imparts differs somewhat from Roberts’. Certainly, there is a case for suicide when it comes to analysing the Occupy Movement. However, the suicide was not the result of Occupy’s distaste for democratic politics as such. Occupy did not fail because it repudiated democracy outright. It failed because the very democratic ideals and practices it sought to realise were unsustainable. At the end of a book on democracy against itself, the hope is that this revelation is no longer surprising. Both within the nation-state and now beyond its confines, the prospect that democracy can go off the rails and jeopardise its survival, even as it struggles to realise its own democratic ideals, is real. It has happened before and it continues to happen now. In Athens, in Weimar, in the United States, in China, in Occupy, and not to mention in the many other instances not explored within these pages, there is enough evidence to suggest that the road to democracy is rocky and that it may at some point end.

Notes  1. Oscar Hemer and Thomas Tufte, ‘The Challenge of the Glocal’, Global Times (vol. 1, 2005). 159

democracy against itself   2. Bob Jessop, ‘Challenging democratic governance: The impact of globalisation on the territorial and temporal sovereign of the state and the capacities of civil society’, in Terrell Carver and Jens Bartelson (eds), Globality, Democracy and Civil Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 77.   3. Daniele Archibugi and David Held, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Daniele Archibugi and David Held (eds), Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 6; Roland Bleiker, ‘Activism after Seattle: Dilemma of the Antiglobalization Movement’, Pacifica Review (vol. 14, no. 3, 2002), 201.   4. Daniele Archibugi, ‘The Hope for a Global Democracy’, New Political Science (vol. 32, no. 1, 2010), 84.  5. John Dryzek, ‘Transnational Democracy’, Journal of Political Philosophy (vol. 7, no. 1, 1999), 30.   6. John Keane, ‘Democracy in the twenty-first century: Global questions’, in Terrell Carver and Jens Bartelson (eds), Globality, Democracy and Civil Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 112.  7. William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 157.   8. Jessop, ‘Challenging democratic governance’, 80.  9. Donatella della Porta, Can Democracy Be Saved? Participation, Deliberation and Social Movements (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 106. 10. Keane, ‘Democracy in the twenty-first century’, 121. 11. Jackie Smith, Social Movements for Global Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 9. 12. Marianne Maeckelbergh, ‘Experiments in democracy and diversity within the Occupy Movement(s)’, openDemocracy, 6 October 2012, http://www.opendemocracy.net/marianne-maeckelbergh/experi​ ments-in-democracy-and-diversity-within-occupy-movements. 13. Bleiker, ‘Activism after Seattle’, 192. 14. David Held, ‘Democracy and the New International Order’, in Daniele Archibugi and David Held (eds), Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 15. Terry Macdonald and Raffaele Marchetti, ‘Symposium on Global Democracy: Introduction’, Ethics and International Affairs (vol. 24, no. 1, 2010), 13. 16. Ibid. 17. See Peter J. Schraeder, ‘Promoting an International Community of Democracies’, in Peter J. Schraeder (ed.), Exporting Democracy: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002). 18. John Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics: Discourse and Democracy in a Divided World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 151. 19. Philip G. Cerny, ‘Some Pitfalls of Democratisation in a Globalising World’, Millennium (vol. 37, no. 3, 2009), 768–9. 160

occupy democracy 20. Archibugi and Held, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, 13. 21. Jessop, ‘Challenging democratic governance’, 79. 22. Roland Bleiker, ‘The Politics of Change: Why Global Democracy Needs Dissent’, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (vol. 9, no. 2, 2008), 36. 23. Simon Tormey, ‘Occupy Wall Street: From Representation to PostRepresentation’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies (vol. 5, 2012), 133. 24. Ibid. 25. Maeckelbergh, ‘Experiments in democracy and diversity within the Occupy Movement(s)’. 26. Tormey, ‘Occupy Wall Street: From Representation to PostRepresentation’, 134. 27. John Buell, ‘Occupy Wall Street’s Democratic Challenge’, Theory & Event (vol. 14, no. 4, Supplement, 2011). 28. Alasdair Roberts, ‘Why the Occupy Movement Failed’, Public Administration Review (vol. 72, no. 5, 2012), 755. 29. Jen Roesch, ‘The life and times of Occupy Wall Street’, International Socialism: A Quarterly Journal of Socialist Theory (vol. 35, 2012). 30. Wendy Brown, ‘Occupy Wall Street: Return of a Repressed ResPublica’, Theory & Event (vol. 14, no. 4, Supplement, 2011); Marina Sitrin, ‘Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements’, Dissent (vol. 59, no. 2, 2012), 74; della Porta, Can Democracy Be Saved?, 83. 31. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘The Fight for “Real Democracy” at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street’, Foreign Affairs, 11 October 2011, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136399/michael-hardt-andantonio-negri/the-fight-for-real-democracy-at-the-heart-of-occupywall-street. 32. David Nugent, ‘Democracy, temporalities of capitalism, and dilemmas of inclusion in Occupy movements’, American Ethnologist (vol. 39, no. 2, 2012), 281–2. 33. Douglas Rushkoff, ‘Permanent Revolution: Occupying Democracy’, The Sociological Quarterly (vol. 54, no. 2, 2013), 171. 34. Brown, ‘Occupy Wall Street’. 35. Buell, ‘Occupy Wall Street’s Democratic Challenge’. 36. Robyn cited in Jennifer Bardi, ‘An Insider’s View from Occupy Oakland’, The Humanist (January/February, 2012). 37. Hardt and Negri, ‘The Fight for “Real Democracy” at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street’. 38. Miki Kashtan, ‘Sustaining the Occupy Movement’, Tikkun (Spring, 2012), 26. 39. Ibid. 40. Maeckelbergh, ‘Experiments in democracy and diversity within the Occupy Movement(s)’. 161

democracy against itself 41. Sitrin, ‘Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements’, 75. 42. L. A. Kauffman, ‘The Theology of Consensus’, in Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen and editors from n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy and The New Inquiry (eds), Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (London: Verso Books, 2011), 47. 43. Manissa McCleave Maharawal, ‘Occupy Wall Street and a Radical Politics of Inclusion’, The Sociological Quarterly (vol. 54, no. 2, 2013), 178. 44. Id., 179. 45. Nathan Schneider, ‘From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere’, The Nation, 31 October 2011, http://www.thenation.com/arti cle/163924/occupy-wall-street-occupy-everywhere. 46. Maple Razsa (with Andrej Kurnik), ‘The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s hometown: Direction democracy and a politics of becoming’, American Ethnologist (vol. 39, no. 2, 2012), 242. 47. McCleave Maharawal, ‘Occupy Wall Street and a Radical Politics of Inclusion’, 179. 48. Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Why I Occupy’, Public Culture (vol. 24, no. 3, 2012), 452. 49. Henry A. Giroux, ‘Occupy Wall Street’s Battle against American-Style Authoritarianism’, Fast Capitalism (vol. 9, no. 1, 2012). 50. Nick Couldry and Natalie Fenton cited in Mirzoeff, ‘Why I Occupy’, 453. 51. Judith Butler, ‘Bodies in Public’, in Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen and editors from n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy and The New Inquiry (eds), Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (London: Verso Books, 2011), 193. 52. Hardt and Negri, ‘The Fight for “Real Democracy” at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street’. 53. Jodi Dean, ‘Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong’, in Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen and editors from n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy and The New Inquiry (eds), Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (London: Verso Books, 2011). 54. Id., 89. 55. Id., 90. 56. Roberts, ‘Why the Occupy Movement Failed’, 759. 57. Rezsa (with Kurnik), ‘The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s hometown’, 244–5. 58. Id., 245. 59. Kauffman, ‘The Theology of Consensus’, 49. 60. Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (New York: It Books, 2012), ch. 7. 61. Roberts, ‘Why the Occupy Movement Failed’, 757. 62. Jackie Smith and Bob Glidden, ‘Occupy Pittsburgh and the Challenges 162

occupy democracy of Participatory Democracy’, Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest (vol. 11, nos. 3–4, 2012), 289. 63. Id., 290. 64. Ibid. 65. Alasdair Roberts, ‘Why Occupy failed’, Prospect, 21 June 2012, http:// www.prospectmagazine.co.uk / blog / occupy - failed - adbusters - on - yearanniversary/.

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Index

99 per cent, 139, 156, 158 Aeschylus, 26, 37–43, 48, 49, 164 Arab Spring, vii Athens, xi, 6, 8, 24–37, 44–7, 48, 50, 105, 110, 141, 154, 159, 166, 168, 171, 176, authoritarianism, vii, 3, 7, 72, 77, 81, 83, 84, 90, 93, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 116, 119, 120, 121, 123, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 150, 159, 162, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176 autonomy, 24, 35, 45, 46, 49, 50, 124, 146, 166 Boule, 25, 30, 32, Bush, George W., 79, 80, 81, 82, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 108, 166, 169 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 26, 45–7, 49, 166, 171 coup d’état, vii, 2, 33, 36, 67, 140, 156 De Tocqueville, Alexis, 8–10, 22, 91, 167 democide, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 20, 24, 35, 36, 44, 50, 72, 166 democracy against itself, ix, xi, 1, 2, 6, 7–20, 24, 26, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 45, 51, 52, 63, 67, 70, 81, 92, 139, 141, 142, 143, 148, 149, 155, 157, 159 democratic consolidation, 3–5, 21, 167, 174, 175, 176 Ekklesia, 25, 30, 33 Enabling Act, 61, 66, 70 endogenous termination, 1, 2, 5–7, 24, 43, 44, 142

exogenous termination, 1, 2–5, 11, 20, 24, 35, 142, 159 fascist technique, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71 Giroux, Henry A., 81, 90, 93, 99–103, 104, 108, 110, 111, 112, 151, 162, 168–9 global social movements, 148, 149–50, 152, 160, 163, 167, 175 Goebbels, Joseph, viii Gross, Bertram, 88–9, 90, 91, 93, 107, 169 Hitler, 51–57, 60–2, 64, 70, 73, 74, 75, 96, 165, 168, 169, 170, 172 Horizontalism, 140, 153, 158, 161, 162, 175 House of Cards, 87–8, 107, 173 incremental democracy, 126, 136, 137, 177, intolerant democracies, xi, 14, 76, 168 inverted totalitarianism, 74, 90, 92–9, 100, 107, 110, 111, 112, 116, 119, 129, 130, 131, 132, 177 Loewenstein, Karl, 51, 52, 54–6, 56–9, 61, 63–8, 68–71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 135, 171, 172 managed democracy, 74, 90, 92, 98, 177 militant democracy, 50, 51, 52, 63–8, 68–72, 75, 76, 171, 172–3 Moss, Robert, viii, xii, 47, 173 new authoritarianism, 99, 108, 111, 112, 116–23, 129–33, 135, 136, 137, 138, 169, 172

index Obama, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 88, 93, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 140, 168, 169 Occupy Movement, xi, 79, 80, 102, Chapter 6 Peloponnesian War, 26, 29, 31, 34 Plato, 8–11, 30, 38, 44, 45 popular threats, 11–13, 15, 22, 60, 66, 171 post-democracy, 75, 104, 109, 167 Probouloi, 26, 32–3 proceduralism, 13, 22, 71, 140, 171, self-limitation, 47 state of exception, 61, 74, 164

strong democracy, 80, 81, 97 Suppliants, 37–44 totalitarianism, 7, 8, 18, 20, 22, 74, 83, 90, 91, 92, 93–110, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 116, 119, 120, 121, 123, 129, 130, 131, 132, 170, 174, 177 tragedy, 24, 26, 37–9, 40, 42, 44, 48, 49, 169, 174, 176 tyranny of the majority, xii, 9, 10, 150, 175 Wolin, Sheldon S., 60, 74, 81, 90, 92, 93–100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 131, 138, 151, 177

179