Not with a bang or a crunch but a gradual fade to grey

Highly readable account of democracy’s demise marred by unsatisfactory ending

HOW DEMOCRACY ENDS

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CONTEMPORARY representative democracy is tired, vindictive, paranoid, self-deceiving, clumsy and frequently ineffectual”. So says the Cambridge academic and broadcaster David Runciman, who believes democracy is on its way out.

But don’t think that what happened when democracy failed in the past will be any guide to the future. Don’t expect military coups, goose-stepping fascism or other forms of overtly authoritarian rule. Runciman believes we’re more likely to find ourselves in a “zombie democracy”, which still goes through the motions.

This is a disturbing obituary for what we should remember is a very recent form of political organisation.

As Runciman points out, until the late 19th century democracy was widely regarded as possibly the worst form of government. It was derided by political thinkers from Plato to Max Weber, essentially because they thought that allowing stupid people to vote would lead to government by demagogues and charlatans.

That view is gaining ground again in the 21st century, he says, following Trump and Brexit.

Runciman isn’t an advocate of what he calls “epistocracy”: the idea that people should only get the vote if they are sufficiently educated to use it. He is right to dismiss this: the current campus fashion for no-platforming should be warning enough that highly-educated people can be very stupid indeed. Nothing could be worse than being governed by a claque of preening, querulous academics.

Rule by experts, in the form of technocracy, has been tried recently. Bankers effectively took over government in Italy and Greece during the banking crisis, but that is not a viable form either in Runciman’s view because it lacks legitimacy.

Indeed, one of the problems with this book – which is highly readable, thoughtful and filled with fascinating observations on contemporary politics – is that it is never entirely clear what Runciman thinks is going to happen when democracy ends.

He considers China’s “authoritarian pragmatism”, then Russia’s “illiberal democracy”. He toys with the idea that we may end up with a form of Silicon Valley techno-authoritarianism ruled by digital behemoths. “Mark Zuckerberg is a bigger threat to American democracy,” he says at one point, “than Donald Trump”, though it’s not entirely clear he believes that.

Nor does Runciman have any answers – indeed he makes a point of not proposing any solutions to democracy’s malaise. He says that what he calls “solutionism” is part of the problem.

He clearly dislikes direct democracy by referendum: “A referendum looks democratic but is not”.

He dismisses online anarchism, as practised, he says, by the Occupy Movement, and he has little time for “accelerationism” – the idea popularised by the journalist Paul Mason that technology will soon satisfy all our material needs and bring about the end of class conflict. This is sometimes called “fully automated luxury communism”.

IN fact, it’s not entirely clear that, deep down, Runciman, believes democracy is about to end. He suggests that it may just enter a long-drawn-out senility, which might not be all that disagreeable. “Japan and Greece,” he says, “now offer the best guides to how democracy might end up.” They are both aged societies with low growth, and pretty obvious social care problems, but are democratic and remain civilised and stable.

Japan, Runciman points out, is the least violent society on Earth and,

Mark Zuckerberg is a bigger threat to American democracy than Donald Trump