Preface

In my book Post-Democracy, first published in 2003, I argued that in much of the western world we were drifting towards a condition where democracy was becoming a shadow of itself. Its institutions and habits remained: contested elections took place; governments could be brought down and peacefully replaced; political debate seemed fierce. But its vivacity and vigour had declined: parties and governments did not so much respond to desires articulated autonomously by groups of citizens, but manipulated issues and public opinion. Meanwhile, the real energy of the political system had passed into the hands of small elites of politicians and the corporate rich, who increasingly ensured that politics responded to the wishes of the latter. No one was to ‘blame’ for this in the normal sense, even those who gained from it. The two principal causes were beyond easy human manipulation. First, globalization had removed major economic decisions to levels that could not be reached from where democracy was concentrated: the nation-state. This was rendering much political economic debate futile. Second, the divisions of class and religion that had once enabled ordinary citizens to acquire a political identity were losing their meaning, making it increasingly difficult for us all to answer the question: ‘Who am I, politically?’ And unless we can answer that question, it is difficult for us to play an active part in democracy.

Because of these major forces of change, the worlds of politics and of normal life were drifting apart. Politicians responded to this by resorting to increasingly artificial means of communication with voters, using the techniques of advertising and market research in a very one-sided kind of interaction. Voters were becoming like puppets, dancing to tunes set by the manipulators of public opinion, rarely able to articulate their own concerns and priorities. This only intensified the growing artificiality of democracy; hence, post-democracy. I did not argue in 2003 that we had already reached a state of post-democracy. Most contemporary societies with long-established democratic institutions still had many citizens capable of making new demands and frustrating the plans of the puppet-masters; but we were on the road towards it.

I made three important mistakes in this account. First, I concentrated too much on the importance of what I called ‘democratic moments’, points in time when political professionals lost control of the agenda, permitting groups of citizens to shape it. I did not pay attention to the institutions that sustain and protect democracy outside those moments. Second, although I recognized xenophobic populism as one of the movements in contemporary society that seemed to challenge post-democracy, I both underestimated its depth and importance, and did not see how it would mark more an intensification of post-democratic trends than an answer to them. Third, I talked of both the failure of the middle and lower social classes of post-industrial societies to develop a distinctive politics, and the important role of feminism as another challenge to post-democracy, but failed to perceive that some elements of feminism are in part the distinctive politics of those classes.

These mistakes are linked. In the initial years of this century it seemed possible to take for granted the viability of the constitutional order that safeguards democracy – and indeed disguises post-democracy as democracy. The xenophobic movements that have achieved such prominence since that time in Europe, the USA and elsewhere have made it clear that they do not accept the priority of such institutions as the autonomy of the judiciary, the rule of law or the role of parliaments. Since these movements stand predominantly on the political right, it tends today to be parties of the centre and left that defend these institutions. In a longer historical perspective it may seem strange that the left is defending constitutions against a right that has always claimed to have that role; that is a mark of how politics is changing. Further, xenophobic movements are becoming the main bearers, not just of fear and hatred of foreigners, but of a pessimistic, nostalgic social conservatism in general, including resentment at recent advances made by women. Movements guided at least in part by feminist ideas then become their major antagonists, going beyond ‘women’s issues’ as such. I hope by the end of this book to have remedied these mistakes.

Post-Democracy also appears not so much in error, as dated, for other reasons. It began with an account of the taken-for-granted complacency that surrounded democracy in many parts of the world at its time of writing. This was the period when Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of liberal capitalist democracy as the summit of human institutional achievement, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), was still in vogue. It was several years before books were to appear with titles like the late Peter Mair’s The Hollowing of Western Democracy (2013), but it was in 2018 that such a literature became a flood, with David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky’s How Democracies Die, Robert Kuttner’s Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains. The annual democracy index produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit considered that 13 per cent of the world’s population lived in ‘fully functioning’ democracies in 2006 – the first year in which the report was published. By 2017 it had dropped to 4.5 per cent (Economist Intelligence Unit, annual).

I was also writing before the financial crisis of 2008 was to demonstrate one of my core arguments: that lobbying for the interests of global business had produced a deregulated economy that neglected all other interests in society. I had not fully appreciated the special place of the financial sector in the array of capitalist interests, and the particular challenge it presented to democracy. Two years later the European debt crisis seemed to produce perfect examples of post-democracy in action, as parliaments in Greece and Italy were presented with a choice: vote for the appointment of prime ministers designated by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and an unofficial committee of leading banks, or receive no help out of the crisis. The forms of democratic choice were preserved: the new prime ministers – both of whom had formerly been employees of Goldman Sachs, one of the banks at the heart of the crises – were not simply imposed; parliaments had to vote for them. That is how post-democracy works. But that account is itself over-simple. There are serious questions over the democratic credentials of the previous governments of both countries.

Finally, the years since I wrote Post-Democracy have seen the extraordinary rise of social media and their use in political mobilization. In my book, I welcomed the role of the Internet as enabling civil society groups to organize and spread discussions, providing some useful countervailing power against large corporations and media organizations. This we now know was naive. Since the early years of the century, the Internet economy has produced its own colossal enterprises, compounding further the potential political role of capitalist power and wealth. The Internet has also facilitated the distribution of extraordinary outbursts of hate speech, a deterioration in the quality of debate and a capacity to broadcast falsehood. Much of this is linked to the rise of the new xenophobic movements of the far right, the self-styled ‘alt.right’. Social media do continue to enable civil society groups and individuals who previously lacked any chance of political voice to find one, but the possessors of colossal wealth have been purchasing technology and expertise that enable them to discover the salient characteristics of millions of citizens and target them with vast numbers of persuasive messages, giving the impression of huge movements of opinion, apparently coming from millions of separate people, that in fact emanate from a single source. It is difficult to imagine a more perfectly post-democratic form of politics, giving an impression of debate and conflict that is really stage-managed from a small number of concealed sources. What seemed to be a liberating, democratizing technology has turned out to favour a small number of extremely rich individuals and groups – those wealthy persons having the temerity to pose as the opponents of ‘elites’. The relationship of social media to democracy and post-democracy requires a re-examination.

These various developments make necessary the revision, updating and changing of the arguments in Post-Democracy. In Chapter 1 of Post-Democracy After the Crises, I restate what I meant by the idea in the first place and why it seemed relevant to write about it. Chapters 2–6 deal in turn with the forces that seem to be exacerbating post-democratic trends: the corruption of politics by wealth and lobbying power; the financial crisis and the conduct of measures to end it; the European debt crisis; the rise of xenophobic populism; and the erosion of democracy’s roots among citizens. Post-Democracy was a dystopia. A dystopia says: this is the direction in which we are heading, and it seems bad. But if the author wants to avoid bleak pessimism, she or he must also say to the reader: if you do not like where we are heading, here are some things we can do about it....