Post-Democracy After the Crises. Colin Crouch

Post-Democracy After the Crises - Colin Crouch


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over major policy directions (a fundamental characteristic of post-democracy), politicians start exploring every little avenue they can in order to claim that they have found a difference from their opponents – anything from each other’s personal morality to the desirability of particular medical treatments or ways of teaching children to read. This leads to an intrusion of politics – whether democratic or not – into areas with which it is not well equipped to deal.

      To sustain my argument that changes in our political life can be described as steps on a road towards post-democracy, I need to demonstrate two things: first, that there was a period in the recent past when democracy could be said to have been strong; and second, that there has been a falling away since. The first requires identification of a ‘democratic moment’.

      Democracy thrives when there are major opportunities for the mass of ordinary people to participate, through discussion and autonomous organizations, in shaping the agenda of public life, and when they are actively using these opportunities. This is ambitious, an ideal model, which can almost never be fully achieved; but, like all impossible ideals, it sets a marker. It is intensely practical to consider where our conduct stands in relation to an ideal, since in that way we can try to improve. It is essential to take this approach to democracy rather than the more common one, which is to scale down definitions of the ideal so that they conform to what we actually achieve. That way lies complacency, self-congratulation and an absence of concern to identify ways in which democracy is being weakened.

      In most of western Europe and North America, we had major democratic moments at some point between the 1930s (in the United States and Scandinavia) and the years immediately following the Second World War (the rest of us). Until those points, few countries had had extensive periods of full male adult suffrage – in even fewer did women enjoy political citizenship. Masses of ordinary people then discovered they had a political voice, and formed parties and other organizations to express their concerns. There had been earlier rumblings of democratic moments, especially around the turn of the century and the time of the First World War, but in several European societies the elites who had been accustomed to having political life serve their interests alone were simply not prepared to accept this invasion of their privileged space. Many of them threw their weight behind fascist and Nazi parties, which, despite speaking a populist rhetoric and making use of mass mobilizations, were deeply hostile to democracy and, once in power, suppressed it with ruthless violence. The defeat of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other fascist leaders in the Second World War and the devastation of their countries led these elites to accept not only the election of governments, but also the pursuit of political agendas promoted by groups from outside their own ranks.

      Some entropy of maximal democracy has to be expected, but two primary factors, in turn producing a third, have accelerated the process. These are:

       economic globalization and the associated rise of the giant firm;

       changes in class structure and (in western Europe but not the US) a decline in the power of religion, which have more or less inevitably weakened the main forces that linked ordinary people to political life;

       and, in consequence of these two forces, a growing tendency for politicians to reduce their links with their mass supporters and prefer the company of global business elites.

      Today’s dominant politico-economic ideology, neoliberalism, has turned this weakening of the nation-state into a virtue. If it is believed that governments are almost by definition incompetent and that large firms are necessarily efficient, then the less power the former have and the more freedom from them that firms gain, the better. Large numbers of politicians and politically active persons, from all points of the political spectrum, came to believe this during the latter years of the twentieth century. A decline in the importance of political democracy was almost bound to follow.


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