The hubris about the triumph of liberal democracy and its “End of History” permanence which gushed from perennial optimists like Francis Fukuyama after the end of the Cold War has been replaced by anxiety about the waves of authoritarian, faux anti-establishment populism that have swept across the world in the second and third decades of the 21st century. Authors such as David Runciman[1] have seriously considered a terminus for democracy in an era where the pragmatic authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party replaces the liberal or representative democratic model of governance of the superpower whose role of supreme global hegemon, namely the United States, as the template for future governance.
Others see the “illiberal democracy” as a lodestar; polities like Hungary, Poland and the Philippines where the principal of electoral mandates survives but where power is held exclusively by a latter day Caudillo (Bolinasario in Brazil or Duterte in the Philippines) or by ideological autocrats (like Fidesz in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland or the “Bolivarian” socialism of Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela) who maintain control through crippling the judiciary, independent media and civil society institutions and by packing key utility providers and enterprise agencies with party or personal cronies.
However, all may not be lost. The US democratic system has survived the near-death experience of the Trump presidency and the attempt by his followers in the insurrection on Capitol Hill on 6th January 2021 to thwart the transfer of power to the victor in the US Presidential Election of 2020, Joseph Biden. In Hungary, the opposition parties look like sinking their differences, anti-Fascist Popular Front style, and getting behind the Mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karascony, as a unity candidate in opposition to Victor Orban in the April 2022 general election.[2] In Brazil tens of thousands of protestors have taken to the streets in response to Bolinasario’s catastrophic handling (like Trump’s) of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ominously though this Trump protégé has hinted at a “Stop the Steal” campaign against the likely victory of his “illegitimate” and “anti-national” left-wing opponents in the forthcoming Presidential election and is summoning mobs of supporters for just that purpose.
Since it was the double earthquake that hit the Anglo-American political world in 2016; namely the vote to leave the European Union by UK voters in that year’s referendum and the election of Donald Trump as US President that has catalysed this all-pervasive angst about the future survival of democracy, it is appropriate to examine the defects in the British and US polities that have produced such upheavals. Specifically, it was shortcomings in the UK ‘s unwritten or, more exactly, uncodified constitution and in the written constitution of the US that sowed the seeds for the twin tremors.
However, all may not be lost. The US democratic system has survived the near-death experience of the Trump presidency and the attempt by his followers in the insurrection on Capitol Hill on 6th January 2021 to thwart the transfer of power to the victor in the US Presidential Election of 2020, Joseph Biden. In Hungary, the opposition parties look like sinking their differences, anti-Fascist Popular Front style, and getting behind the Mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karascony, as a unity candidate in opposition to Victor Orban in the April 2022 general election.[2] In Brazil tens of thousands of protestors have taken to the streets in response to Bolinasario’s catastrophic handling (like Trump’s) of the Covid-19 pandemic. Ominously though this Trump protégé has hinted at a “Stop the Steal” campaign against the likely victory of his “illegitimate” and “anti-national” left-wing opponents in the forthcoming Presidential election and is summoning mobs of supporters for just that purpose.
Since it was the double earthquake that hit the Anglo-American political world in 2016; namely the vote to leave the European Union by UK voters in that year’s referendum and the election of Donald Trump as US President that has catalysed this all-pervasive angst about the future survival of democracy, it is appropriate to examine the defects in the British and US polities that have produced such upheavals. Specifically, it was shortcomings in the UK ‘s unwritten or, more exactly, uncodified constitution and in the written constitution of the US that sowed the seeds for the twin tremors.
The philosopher A.C. Grayling in asking what a democratic order look should like and how it delivers for its citizens, proposes a rewriting of the principles and practices of democracy, and stipulates that good government needs to be fireproofed from the effects of partisan political conflict. He finds that the ‘Westminster Model, examples of which – exist in the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zeeland, India, Republic of Ireland, and nearly fifty other states including the US and other countries which have modified the Westminster Model into a presidential or hybrid form[3], is no longer fit for purpose. Why and how it can be refashioned for the 21st century is the subject of this article. But first it is necessary to clarify or restate what the concepts of democracy and democratic government is.
Democracy and its Principles
For Grayling, democracy is a political system in which the people appoint a government and instruct it to legislate and administer on their behalf, protecting and promoting their interests by responsible and informed action. The concept of democracy requires that government be viewed as the servant of the people, accountable to them and removable by them if it fails to fulfil its function appropriately and adequately[4].
Flowing from this elucidation of the concept of democracy are the following five points. (1) Democratic government is for all the people, not for a group, class, interest, or faction consisting only of part of the populace and acting primarily in their interests. This means (2) that democratic government is neither majoritarian or minoritarian, but inclusive in its aims, duties, and purposes because of the diversity of society in terms of individuals and minorities. A ‘majority’ is basically a temporary coalition of minorities relative to some issue. Democratic government is not majoritarian because not even a large majority can be permitted to violate minority and individual rights. Democratic government is not minoritarian as it is unacceptable for a particular group or faction to monopolise the drawing and administration of law and policy for all of society in its totality. In the event of consensus not being achieved, majority agreement is accepted as the way forward, unless it infringes minority rights.[5].
Despite the necessity of majority agreement in the absence of consensus, the condition of (1) that the first duty of government is to govern in the interests of all of the demos means that the government has to effectively transcend politics, in that political disagreement between different parties and interest groups about public policy choices has to be subordinated to the public interest once the public has decided its preferences at election time, concerning what they have heard in policy debates and what they desire to have deliberated on, implemented or altered.[6]
Because an electoral system (3) preferably of a Proportional Representation type for reasons that should become obvious, giving an accurate reflection of peoples’ preferences is required, the eventual electoral outcome will most likely result in a legislature in which no party has an overall majority. The compromises and agreements `needed to secure what is most likely to be a coalition executive are how government transcends narrow and partisan political desires. (4) Independent audits of the likely impact of legislation, under a constitutional mandate that the effect on all in the state should be explicitly evaluated, will help to ensure that the government itself is not hostage to faction but lives up to the democratic purpose of its existence: to serve all and the public good.[7]
The combined effects of these checks and balances are to prioritise the business government over the partisan rivalries of party politics which have their place in the electoral and deliberative processes but not to the extent that they render government hostage to partisan interests or negate its duty to the public. Since some of the Westminster Model systems are likely to be resistant towards the formal and physical separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers, proportional system of representation will likely militate against the risks of one-party partisan rule such as the machinations of the more ideological actors of the ruling party[8]; the shrill voices of the Brexiteer ideologues in the ruling Conservative Party in the UK being a seminal case in point.
Whereas the formal duties and functions of the institutions of government can be formally codified in a written constitution, the latter can only partially regulate the informal aspects of politics – the main actors in politics and government and the news, information, and opinion media. While the duties and behaviour of representatives may be itemized explicitly in Codes of Conduct, the absence of full monitoring of the behaviour of representatives may render such mechanisms ineffective. The role of political activists and party machines in selecting and controlling representatives also requires scrutiny and transparency[9] as is evidenced by the rise to party leadership of controversial and divisive personalities such as PM Boris Johnson and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
An independent fact checking agency would be an essential innovation.[10] Such a body would not censor the output of the print, broadcast and online media but would mandate the publishing of its findings on all platforms in order to give effective antidotes to the notoriously partisan nature of the British print media and the tsunami of misinformation (not least on Covid-19 and vaccination) and inflammatory content on Facebook, Twitter etc.[11]
To summarise: the principal flaw of contemporary Westminster Model democracies is the absence of a separation of powers, which turbo-charges the power of the executive, and therefore any force with influence in or on the executive. When buttressed by a First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system it is calamitous.
The UK and the ongoing Brexit debacle provides vivid proof of just how deleterious the system is. FPTP voting produces a majority in the House of Commons on minority not merely of the electorate as a whole but even of votes cast. The government is formed from this majority of MPs and, through the whipping system of party discipline and career dependency, controls it. The executive has total power because Parliament is sovereign, the House of Commons controls Parliament, and the executive controls the majority in the House of Commons.[12] Next the executive is controlled by the vigorous and partisan minority in the party itself, a power clique, self-selected and organised to advance an agenda[13]. The story of Brexit and how it upended the procedures and culture of liberal representative democracy is the story of how a rump of anti-EU MPs on the backbenches of the Conservative Party persistently undermined UK-EU relations and eventually persuaded former PM David Cameron to hold a binary referendum on EU membership. The Leave campaign won narrowly, transforming overnight a recalcitrant minority of obsessives into a power clique who with their control over the Tory grassroots and support from wealthy and partisan media interests have been able to secure a Hard Brexit without any proper Parliamentary scrutiny. For Grayling, democracy is the defence against the usurpation of power by some whose objectives (like those of Tory Brexiteers) are not consonant with what is optimal for all.[14]
Critical Infrastructure
In a similar vein to Grayling’s renewal agenda for democracy, Jan-Werner Muller proposes fundamental modifications to what he conceptualises as its “critical infrastructure” which like physical infrastructure facilitates the reaching of people and being reached by them.[15] Returning to the basic definitional roots of democracy, Muller discusses the dual nature or the two crucial sites of democracy. First, it requires a designated focus (and specified times) for collectively binding decision making – for the expression of political will through lawmaking; a majority getting its way, after the opposition has had its way. On the other hand, it requires a place for the dynamic formation of opinion preferences and political judgments in society at large; everyone has the right to express opinions and to participate at any level of decision making at any time.[16]
Decision making requires procedures, which always means clearly segmented time frames; elections are supposed to be held at regular intervals (in the case of the UK Parliament at fixed five-year intervals. Hence the first site of democracy is distinguished by a certain predictability. By contrast the realm of opinion formation or the public sphere can be, in the words of Jurgen Habermas, a space for “wild cacophonies”.[17]
The public sphere is independent of specific location and particular media technology developments. It can certainly be in special places, [18] be they the agora in ancient democratic Athens; the coffeehouses and salons of 18th century London or the sites of modern protest and revolution such as Tahrir Square, Maidan, and Tiananmen Square. By contrast the legislative site has a static locale; the office of Parliament which in the words of John Stuart Mill is:
Democracy and its Principles
For Grayling, democracy is a political system in which the people appoint a government and instruct it to legislate and administer on their behalf, protecting and promoting their interests by responsible and informed action. The concept of democracy requires that government be viewed as the servant of the people, accountable to them and removable by them if it fails to fulfil its function appropriately and adequately[4].
Flowing from this elucidation of the concept of democracy are the following five points. (1) Democratic government is for all the people, not for a group, class, interest, or faction consisting only of part of the populace and acting primarily in their interests. This means (2) that democratic government is neither majoritarian or minoritarian, but inclusive in its aims, duties, and purposes because of the diversity of society in terms of individuals and minorities. A ‘majority’ is basically a temporary coalition of minorities relative to some issue. Democratic government is not majoritarian because not even a large majority can be permitted to violate minority and individual rights. Democratic government is not minoritarian as it is unacceptable for a particular group or faction to monopolise the drawing and administration of law and policy for all of society in its totality. In the event of consensus not being achieved, majority agreement is accepted as the way forward, unless it infringes minority rights.[5].
Despite the necessity of majority agreement in the absence of consensus, the condition of (1) that the first duty of government is to govern in the interests of all of the demos means that the government has to effectively transcend politics, in that political disagreement between different parties and interest groups about public policy choices has to be subordinated to the public interest once the public has decided its preferences at election time, concerning what they have heard in policy debates and what they desire to have deliberated on, implemented or altered.[6]
Because an electoral system (3) preferably of a Proportional Representation type for reasons that should become obvious, giving an accurate reflection of peoples’ preferences is required, the eventual electoral outcome will most likely result in a legislature in which no party has an overall majority. The compromises and agreements `needed to secure what is most likely to be a coalition executive are how government transcends narrow and partisan political desires. (4) Independent audits of the likely impact of legislation, under a constitutional mandate that the effect on all in the state should be explicitly evaluated, will help to ensure that the government itself is not hostage to faction but lives up to the democratic purpose of its existence: to serve all and the public good.[7]
The combined effects of these checks and balances are to prioritise the business government over the partisan rivalries of party politics which have their place in the electoral and deliberative processes but not to the extent that they render government hostage to partisan interests or negate its duty to the public. Since some of the Westminster Model systems are likely to be resistant towards the formal and physical separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers, proportional system of representation will likely militate against the risks of one-party partisan rule such as the machinations of the more ideological actors of the ruling party[8]; the shrill voices of the Brexiteer ideologues in the ruling Conservative Party in the UK being a seminal case in point.
Whereas the formal duties and functions of the institutions of government can be formally codified in a written constitution, the latter can only partially regulate the informal aspects of politics – the main actors in politics and government and the news, information, and opinion media. While the duties and behaviour of representatives may be itemized explicitly in Codes of Conduct, the absence of full monitoring of the behaviour of representatives may render such mechanisms ineffective. The role of political activists and party machines in selecting and controlling representatives also requires scrutiny and transparency[9] as is evidenced by the rise to party leadership of controversial and divisive personalities such as PM Boris Johnson and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
An independent fact checking agency would be an essential innovation.[10] Such a body would not censor the output of the print, broadcast and online media but would mandate the publishing of its findings on all platforms in order to give effective antidotes to the notoriously partisan nature of the British print media and the tsunami of misinformation (not least on Covid-19 and vaccination) and inflammatory content on Facebook, Twitter etc.[11]
To summarise: the principal flaw of contemporary Westminster Model democracies is the absence of a separation of powers, which turbo-charges the power of the executive, and therefore any force with influence in or on the executive. When buttressed by a First Past the Post (FPTP) voting system it is calamitous.
The UK and the ongoing Brexit debacle provides vivid proof of just how deleterious the system is. FPTP voting produces a majority in the House of Commons on minority not merely of the electorate as a whole but even of votes cast. The government is formed from this majority of MPs and, through the whipping system of party discipline and career dependency, controls it. The executive has total power because Parliament is sovereign, the House of Commons controls Parliament, and the executive controls the majority in the House of Commons.[12] Next the executive is controlled by the vigorous and partisan minority in the party itself, a power clique, self-selected and organised to advance an agenda[13]. The story of Brexit and how it upended the procedures and culture of liberal representative democracy is the story of how a rump of anti-EU MPs on the backbenches of the Conservative Party persistently undermined UK-EU relations and eventually persuaded former PM David Cameron to hold a binary referendum on EU membership. The Leave campaign won narrowly, transforming overnight a recalcitrant minority of obsessives into a power clique who with their control over the Tory grassroots and support from wealthy and partisan media interests have been able to secure a Hard Brexit without any proper Parliamentary scrutiny. For Grayling, democracy is the defence against the usurpation of power by some whose objectives (like those of Tory Brexiteers) are not consonant with what is optimal for all.[14]
Critical Infrastructure
In a similar vein to Grayling’s renewal agenda for democracy, Jan-Werner Muller proposes fundamental modifications to what he conceptualises as its “critical infrastructure” which like physical infrastructure facilitates the reaching of people and being reached by them.[15] Returning to the basic definitional roots of democracy, Muller discusses the dual nature or the two crucial sites of democracy. First, it requires a designated focus (and specified times) for collectively binding decision making – for the expression of political will through lawmaking; a majority getting its way, after the opposition has had its way. On the other hand, it requires a place for the dynamic formation of opinion preferences and political judgments in society at large; everyone has the right to express opinions and to participate at any level of decision making at any time.[16]
Decision making requires procedures, which always means clearly segmented time frames; elections are supposed to be held at regular intervals (in the case of the UK Parliament at fixed five-year intervals. Hence the first site of democracy is distinguished by a certain predictability. By contrast the realm of opinion formation or the public sphere can be, in the words of Jurgen Habermas, a space for “wild cacophonies”.[17]
The public sphere is independent of specific location and particular media technology developments. It can certainly be in special places, [18] be they the agora in ancient democratic Athens; the coffeehouses and salons of 18th century London or the sites of modern protest and revolution such as Tahrir Square, Maidan, and Tiananmen Square. By contrast the legislative site has a static locale; the office of Parliament which in the words of John Stuart Mill is:
… to be at once the nation’s Committee of Grievances and its Congress of Opinions; an arena in which not only the general opinion of the nation, but that of every section of it, and as far as possible of every eminent individual whom it contains, can produce itself in full light and challenge discussion…[19]
It is through the interplay of the discourse of the public spere or civil society encompassing the media, interest groups, social movements etc., with the deliberative processes of Parliament that the two sites of democracy are connected.
Much anxiety has been expressed by proponents of liberal democracy about the corrosive effects of “misinformation,” “fake news” or “alternative facts,” often generated by populist movements or hostile actors weaponizing cyberspace with “sock puppets,” “bots” and conspiracy narratives. Public debate, it is feared, in what is becoming a Trumpian or Putinist dystopia is increasingly about objective “facts” themselves rather than on competing visions on policy and the public good. The starkest recent example of alternative reality was Donald Trump’s baseless claims to have won the 2020 US Presidential election and to have been subsequently cheated of his “victory”. Denial of climate change is another lethally damaging “alternative fact,” to say nothing of Q-Anon conspiracies and deliberate manufacture of Covid-19 stories.
It is thus important to make a fine but important distinction between “facts” and “truth.” As Hannah Arendt pronounced, opinions ought to be constrained by facts, but they are clearly partisan perspectives, and that is perfectly valid.[20]. Representative claims by parties that institute debates and conflicts are thus not principally claims about truth. Under conditions of pluralism, citizens arrive at different judgments depending on different life experiences, a different sense of how to assess facts and different subjective dispositions. Democracy thus can never be a project of establishing a single unitary whole truth in politics; a concept of the truth in politics is despotic and totalitarian in concept and application insisted Arendt[21]
As Christopher Lasch rightly points out:
Much anxiety has been expressed by proponents of liberal democracy about the corrosive effects of “misinformation,” “fake news” or “alternative facts,” often generated by populist movements or hostile actors weaponizing cyberspace with “sock puppets,” “bots” and conspiracy narratives. Public debate, it is feared, in what is becoming a Trumpian or Putinist dystopia is increasingly about objective “facts” themselves rather than on competing visions on policy and the public good. The starkest recent example of alternative reality was Donald Trump’s baseless claims to have won the 2020 US Presidential election and to have been subsequently cheated of his “victory”. Denial of climate change is another lethally damaging “alternative fact,” to say nothing of Q-Anon conspiracies and deliberate manufacture of Covid-19 stories.
It is thus important to make a fine but important distinction between “facts” and “truth.” As Hannah Arendt pronounced, opinions ought to be constrained by facts, but they are clearly partisan perspectives, and that is perfectly valid.[20]. Representative claims by parties that institute debates and conflicts are thus not principally claims about truth. Under conditions of pluralism, citizens arrive at different judgments depending on different life experiences, a different sense of how to assess facts and different subjective dispositions. Democracy thus can never be a project of establishing a single unitary whole truth in politics; a concept of the truth in politics is despotic and totalitarian in concept and application insisted Arendt[21]
As Christopher Lasch rightly points out:
What democracy requires is public debate, not information . . . We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy”[22]
Civil society or intermediary institutions in order to promote the widest possible perspectives on the widest possible versions of reality need to enable both external and internal pluralism. External pluralism refers to the competiveness of the playing field where political parties, professional media and interest groups interact with each other . . . The issue here is not whether one particular version of the truth wins out but the multiplication of creative representative groups in society; those who have innovative ideas about interests and identities ought to be able to test them out freely and find out if there are any takers.[23]
Internal pluralism refers to the desirability of having a diversity of viewpoints within individual intermediary institutions. Concretely this suggests that political parties ought to have proper internal democratic processes such as primaries or extensive debates preceding the election of party officers. Indeed, this practice is mandated in a number of constitutions. It is undeniable that internally democratic parties foster healthy democratic societies [24] but fixation on the mechanics of internal party democracy can enable “entryism;” the massive influx of people committed to changing its character completely as has happened with the entry of Trotskyists and other far left elements into the British Labour Party and other social democratic parties. [25] The experience of the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn stands as a salutary lesson in that regard.
Also, parties must reach conclusive binding decisions and members must be willing to be a loyal opposition (which British Tory Eurosceptics have spectacularly failed to do with monumental consequences for the country at large) and the conundrum of, in the words of Aneurin Bevan, “having to listen to our own people” [26]to the detriment of the wider public interest.
Parties and media provide the essential infrastructure of democracy in that they facilitate association between citizens. Social media have been helpful for “platform parties while at the same time providing an existential threat to some forms of professional journalism and the quality of democratic discourse. Technology per se is not harmful to democracy but the utilization of it by surveillance machines aimed at predicting behaviour or even at making behaviour predictable and hardening resentment and polarization in the process.[27]
It has been the deficiencies of the Westminster model of democratic sovereignty that has helped to fuel the discontents of democracy and has contributed to the disaster of Brexit and its associated cultural divisions; an event which occurred because a small adamantine faction in the British Conservative party was able to bend the party and government to its will. Now that supposedly most pragmatic nation, the UK, is led by a government in thrall to the most extreme, revolutionary aspects of the Brexit project and mired in corruption and possibly law breaking. This must be a clarion call for the reform and renewal of liberal democracy for the 21st century.
Bibliography:
Grayling, A.C. (2021) The Good State. On the Principles of Democracy. London: Oneworld
Muller, Jan-Werner (2021) Democracy Rules. London: Allen Lane
[1] David Runciman (2019) “How Democracy Ends” London: Profile Books
[2] Nick Cohen “Meet the brave, consensual mayor set to face down Hungary’s autocrat” The Observer 19th September 2021
[3] A.C. Grayling (2021) “The Good State. On the Principles of Democracy2 London: Oneworld p.1
[4] Grayling, p.165
[5] Ibid, pp.165-66
[6] Ibid, p.166
[7] Ibid, p.166
[8] Ibid, p.167
[9] Ibid, p.168
[10]Ibid, p.169
[11]
[12] Ibid: pp.168-69
[13] Ibid: p170
[14] Ibid: p.170
[15] Jan-Werner Muller (2021) p.91
[16] Ibid, p.94
[17] Ibid, p.94
[18] Ibid, p.95
[19] John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government” in On Liberty and other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) p.282
[20] Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977) pp.227-64
[21] Ibid.
[22] Christopher Lasch, “Journalism, Publicity, and the Lost Art of Argument”.” Gannett Center Journal (Spring 1990): pp.1-11
[23] Wener-Muiller, p.102
[24] Ibid, p.106
[25] Ibid, p.107
[26] Quoted in Adam Przeworski, Crises of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) p.63
[27] Werner-Muller, pp.137-38
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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