Column: Democracy isn’t guaranteed to survive.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long,” John Adams warned two centuries ago. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
America’s second president was wrong about one thing: democracy in the United States did not soon commit suicide, if 200-plus years can be considered “soon” in the grand sweep of history. Yet democratic institutions are under near-constant attack both here and abroad, with important implications for personal freedom and economic growth.
A recent survey across 34 countries by the Pew Research Center found that 52% of respondents, including 59% in the U.S., are “dissatisfied” with democracy. “In each nation polled,” the report concluded, “the view that democracy is not working well is especially prevalent among those who are pessimistic about the next generation’s economic prospects.”
Based on the latest Democracy Index compiled by The Economist Intelligence Unit, just 22 of 167 countries are considered “full democracies.” The United States was not among that group.
Rupert Murdoch’s conservative New York Post recently accused President Donald Trump of “cheering for an undemocratic coup.” The economies of China, Russia, Hungary, India and Brazil operate as authoritarian (or illiberal) capitalist systems, in which an anti-democratic “strongman” rules over various mutations of a marketbased economy.
The China fallacy
The connection between democracy and economic growth always has been contentious due to vast circumstantial differences between eras and countries.
Plato was skeptical of democracy’s economic advantages and more recently, the widening gap between the world’s haves and have-nots is viewed as further evidence that the democratic process is incapable of controlling capitalism’s Darwinian excesses.
But while China is often cited as a model for authoritarian capitalism, its
hyper-growth since 1978 is based on an expanding labor force, a massive pool of domestic savings that finance public investment and an export-led economy that employs unfair trading practices. Even if those factors were sustainable — and they are not — should the U.S. really try to emulate China?
Authoritarians derive power by mining the emotional pain of those feeling left behind in a world transformed by rapid cultural, economic and technological change.
Shelter from the storm
Authoritarians derive power by mining the emotional pain of those feeling left behind in a world transformed by rapid cultural, economic and technological change. Democratic systems are seen as no longer serving “the people,” and a charismatic political strongman might be thought capable of bestowing the financial rewards that the democratic process has unjustly denied them.
As the French journalist Eric Le Boucher wrote in Les Echos, “There’s now a widespread feeling that democracy was a regime for sunny times.” The “K-shaped” recovery from the pandemic recession, in which economic inequality is amplified, has since deepened that belief.
Yet the desire for shelter from the economic storm does not entirely explain attempts to undermine a political system that Winston Churchill called “the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Hierarchical anxieties — to put it gently — also can motivate the fatal attraction to authoritarian rule.
Be careful what you wish for…
The willingness of some politicians to subvert American democracy in the service of — what, exactly? — carries a heavy dose of irony. For the most part, lawmakers enabling attacks on democratic norms and institutions are enthusiastic backers of free-market capitalism, which it turns out, is strongly correlated with democracy, not political authoritarianism.
A paper titled “Democracy Does Cause Growth” by professors Daron Acemoglu, Suresh Naidu, Pascual Restrepo and James Robinson published in the February 2019 Journal of Political Economy examined data from 184 countries between 1960 and 2010. The authors determined that countries that switched from authoritarian to democratic political systems subsequently boosted long-term economic growth by about 20%, an improvement they attributed to “greater investments in capital, schooling, and health,” as well as to less cronyism.
Whatever its economic advantages, democracy’s survival is not guaranteed. “My reading (of the study results) is not a good-news story,” Acemoglu told the MIT News. “This paper is making the case that democracy is good for economic growth, but that doesn’t make it easy to sustain.”
Democracy itself is like a product in a market-based economy; its existence depends on popular demand for what it offers. As the former Republican federal court Judge Charles W. Pickering once advised, “A healthy democracy requires a decent society; it requires that we are honorable, generous, tolerant and respectful.”
Notice he said “we.”