Revolutions show us democracy will survive

If I read one more hand-wringing article about the ‘‘crisis of American democracy’’ and what it means for the world, I’ll retch.

The last straw was an article in the New Yorker this week by Adam Gopnik. It was called ‘‘What we get wrong about America’s crisis of democracy’’, and the strapline read: ‘‘The interesting question is not what causes authoritarianism but what has ever suspended it.’’

No, that’s the wrong question. It assumes, as Gopnik says, that ‘‘the default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them. The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy.’’

Gopnik grew up in Canada, but seems to have drunk the American Kool-Aid. That is the familiar mythology in which the US is not only the first mass democracy but the indispensable one.

That’s not true. Democracy, not autocracy, is the default mode political system, even though it is ‘‘the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’’, as Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons in 1947.

Almost every dictator holds fake elections to claim legitimacy. No democratic leaders falsely claim to be dictators or tyrants (although some, like Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orba´ n in Hungary and Duterte in the Philippines, secretly aspire to it). So default mode democracy wins in a walk.

This was not true before the 18th century. There are indeed ‘‘all those thousands of years of history’’ when the norm was ‘‘some form of autocracy’’. But before that there are all those hundreds of thousands of years of pre-history when humans lived as equals, reaching decisions by discussion and consensus, in little hunter-gatherer bands. We know this because some of those bands, living in out-of-theway places, survived long enough for anthropologists to study them – and they were all egalitarian. They had no formal leaders, and the worst social crime was for one adult man to give an order to another.

They didn’t hold elections, because the bands were hardly ever more than 100-strong and they could just talk things over. But the core belief of democracy is that everybody has equal rights including a share in the decisionmaking process, and our distant ancestors all believed that. They believed it for so long that it became a basic human value.

That basic human belief went underground when the first mass societies appeared around 6000 years ago. The only way to run them was from the top down, by force, because without mass communications there was no way for thousands of people to make decisions together as equals.

So the tyrants took over and had a very long run, but the belief in equality never died, as all the slave and peasant revolts attest. And by the 18th century a kind of mass communications had finally emerged. Just the printing press plus mass literacy, but that meant everybody could get back to making decisions together as equals, and so the democratic revolutions began.

The US was the first, perhaps because it then had the highest rate of literacy. The far more radical French Revolution came only 13 years later (it even abolished slavery), and democracy just kept spreading. By now half the governments are genuinely elected, and the other half pretend to be.

Democracy has nothing to do with being Western. China was the first country with printing, and if it had also had mass literacy it could have been the first country to have a democratic revolution. US democracy will probably survive its difficulties. Democracy as the world’s default mode certainly will.

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