Populists are not the prime problem of representative democracy. They just indicate that it has one, argues Prof. Philip Manow in an exclusive Topic Brief. The populist claim was only able to become so forceful due to the widespread disenchantment with our contemporary versions of liberal democracy.

Books titled ‘How Democracies Die’ or ‘How Democracy Ends’ seem to aptly capture the currently widespread feeling that liberal, representative democracy as we know and have come to cherish it is currently under threat. The latest Freedom House report comes under the heading: ‘democracy in retreat’. India under Modi, Turkey under Erdogan, Brazil under Bolsonaro, the Philippines under Duterte, Russia under Putin, and yes – the US under Trump: the return of political strongmen with a weak sense for restraint and for safeguarding democracy’s institutional integrity have led many observers to issue alarming notes of ‘backsliding’, ‘democratic recession’, and ‘electoral authoritarianism’, to name only a few.

The liberal camp’s feeling of being besieged is reinforced by the rise of populist parties, especially in Europe: from Movimento and Lega (or Rassemblement National and La France insoumise) in the South to the Sweden Democrats, the Finns, the FPÖ or the AfD in the North or to FIDESZ and PiS (but also SMER in Slovakia and the PSD in Romania) in the East. These parties hold a hostile stance not necessarily towards democracy as such, but towards principles of liberal democracy: separation of powers, constitutionalism plus judicial review, protection of minority rights, a fine grained net of international commitments, and so on.

A century of diagnosing democracy’s demise

One could try to counter the apparent alarmism of current diagnoses by pointing out that, already in 1965, Canadian political scientist C.B. McPherson sighed: ‘We are tired of hearing that democracy is in crisis’ – at a time when democratic self-rule had just embarked on the so-called ‘second wave’ of democratization. Following McPherson, each post-WWII decade has seen diagnoses of democracy’s pending demise: in 1975, the Trilateral Commission, a US think tank, warned of ‘the crisis of democracy’. In the early 1980s, French journalist and philosopher Jean-François Revel analyzed ‘how democracies perish’. Some ten years later, French political scientist and diplomat Jean Marie Guéhenno diagnosed what Revel had forecasted: La fin de la démocratie, once again at a moment that in fact saw the substantial expansion of democratic rule in the world, namely the ‘third wave’ of democratization. In the 2000s Colin Crouch enlightened us that we already live in post-democratic times – not preventing the above-mentioned most recent diagnoses of democracy’s ongoing demise.

True, when Harold Laski in 1931, still under the spell of the Great Depression, gave his Weil-Lectures titled ‘democracy in crisis’, he obviously had a strong point and was, only a little later, tragically proven right – yet, most of his pessimism was based on an in-depht  analysis of the developments in exactly those two countries which then became absolutely pivotal in democracy’s survival, namely the UK and the US.

Should one then plea for a little less gloom and a little more confidence? To paraphrase Mark Twain: have democracy’s deaths always been greatly exaggerated? Well, the answer is likely to be (as it probably always has been in response to each ‘end of …’-diagnosis): past reports may have exaggerated – but isn’t this time different? In democracy as a system of ‘organized uncertainty’ (Adam Przeworski), nothing is ever fully certain. Crisis talk can therefore be seen as an inherent part of democracy itself. The bad news is: this alone cannot reassure us that democracy is alive and kicking. It might really be endangered this time. Even paranoids have real enemies.

Our current moment is different from previous eras

Our current situation is different from past moments of crisis in at least one important dimension. It should be remembered that almost all observers until very recently agreed that democracy – after 1989 – had become the only game in town. Far more popular than claims of an “end of democracy”, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis claimed that history had ended exactly because both economic and political liberalism – i.e. capitalism and democracy – were now perceived as the only legitimate basis for social order. This leads us to  paradoxical situation that ‘the democratic ideal now reigns unchallenged, but that at the same time, regimes claiming to be democratic come in for vigorous criticism almost everywhere’ (Pierre Rosanvallon).

Today, at least in the West, democracy is challenged primarily in the name of democracy. We see direct juxtaposed to representative democracy, illiberal set against liberal democracy, even ‘the people vs. democracy’. Boris Johnson based his recent electoral campaign on framing the conflict as one between ‘the people’ and ‘the politicians’, Donald Trump answered to the initiation of the impeachment process by tweeting to his followers that ‘it’s not me, it’s you they are after!’, labeling the impeachment procedure an assault on democracy. The democratic principle is invoked on all sides, defenders and enemies of the status quo alike. Each camp accuses the other of undermining democracy, of being an enemy of ‘real’ democracy – but the camps invoke very different versions of what ‘real’ democracy is or should be: pure, rather unconstrained popular sovereignty vs. legally very much constrained liberal democracy.

Most populists do not challenge democracy as such, but its liberal institutional safeguards

It is very convenient to cast the political enemy as an anti-democrat. But that is all too often just part of the usual political in-fighting, and shouldn’t influence our analysis too much – as dangerous as this mutual denial of the other’s belonging to the democratic ‘we’ is for a democratic culture at large (crucially based on the assumption of equality). Perhaps more important in our context is that the populist revolt challenges the current democratic order in the name of an allegedly ‘truer’, less distorted, less corrupt, less elitist version of democracy. Populists claims they want to re-establish a ‘real’ democracy instead of the ‘shameless, unresponsive elite rule’ that – according to them – is democratic in name only, only sold to us as a democratic form of government.

One should not dismiss this too quickly as pure, self-interested propaganda. Pointing to their explicit commitment to democracy per se, Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde has proposed to distinguish the new radical left- and right-wing parties from their anti-democratic predecessors of the fundamentalist, anti-system right and left: “It is noteworthy that in the early 20th century, nationalism and socialism mobilised mainly as anti-democratic extremism, whereas at the beginning of the 21st century populists are mainly democratic but anti-liberal. At the very least, this shows that democracy (popular sovereignty and majority rule) is now hegemonic, whereas liberal democracy – which adds key features such as minority rights, rule of law and separation of powers – is not”. We, of course, don’t have to take the populist claim to be the defenders of a true democracy at face value. There is great value in arguments, as made for instance forcefully by German political theorist Jan-Werner Müller, that an ‘illiberal democracy’ (Victor Orbán) is no democracy at all. But the fact remains that the populist challenge takes place in the name of democracy, pointing to a less convenient truth: the populist claim was only able to become so forceful due to the widespread and profound disenchantment with our contemporary versions of liberal democracy.

Populism points to a deeper crisis of how democracy works in the West

To put it differently: the populists are not the prime problem of representative democracy. They just indicate that it has one. Populism is only delivering an uncomfortable message: ‘Democracy is not functioning well, if it were there would be no populist backlash’ (David Runciman). Currently, (almost) everybody seems fine with ‘shooting the messenger’, but in doing so one should not forget the message, because it will be hard to defend liberal  democracy if we continue to comfortably arrange ourselves in confusing cause and effect. And this then also has some rather unpleasant implications for liberalism’s enthusiastic defenders. It is probably much too simplistic to describe our current conflict as one in which sinister illiberal forces – unclear where they all so suddenly have come from – are endangering our beloved, tried and tested political order called democracy.

In this conflict, liberalism is not an innocent, passive victim. Rather populism can be understood as “an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism” (Cas Mudde/ Cristobál Rovira Kaltwasser), as a response to the increasing tendency of taking issues out of politics, constitutionalizing and therefore de-politicizing them, immunizing law from politics, substituting politics with law, in other words as a response to the overstretch of the (neo-)liberal project. In many respects this project itself has turned liberal democracy into technocracy and ‘juristocracy’ (Ran Hirschl); into a postpolitical administration of free markets and free movements – especially in Europe.

The old tension between popular sovereignty and liberalism manifests itself again forcefully in our times, and we can ask why this is so. But this conflict is not fully and fairly described as one between democrats and anti-democrats, and therefore between good and evil, because both camps, with some reason, invoke different versions of democracy. And both camps point, with some justification, to unhealthy developments to which the other only turns a blind eye.