By Liam Pender
As we pass through the first quarter of the 21st century, we have seen monumental changes in society in response to threats of a global, domestic, climate, economic and military nature. There has been war in Europe on a scale not seen since the Second World War. Multiple conflicts in the Middle East have strained social unity in the face of religious hatred, while also deepening economic downturn through energy shortages. The climate debate has become politicised and polarised, split between fossil-fuel populism, Green Capitalism, Climate Maoism, Degrowth and Green Growth. And, to top it all off, a worldwide pandemic.
These shocks, threats and challenges have pushed us towards a potential turning point. The bastions and institutions of the old order, established after the Second World War, which defended life, liberty and the rule of law, at least domestically, since liberal-democratic empires still existed, are now being forsaken by some of the disenfranchised in favour of quick solutions and promises that betray the very principles those institutions were built to uphold.
While it is an interesting, if bleak, subject to study how this “turning point” has come about, I am more concerned with what becomes of the disenfranchised once their democratically elected populists fail, as they inevitably will, to keep their promises. Readers should note that this discussion, and the conclusions it draws, are purely hypothetical: no one can be certain when, where or how something will happen.
The more likely answer is that the disenfranchised audience of the democratic populist will turn on democracy itself, claiming that democracy has had its day and that an authoritarian leader must be chosen to reflect and act upon “the will of the people,” in line with the ideology of paternal autocrats. This would throw away roughly 300 years of excruciatingly slow liberalisation of democracies around the world, the struggle to achieve some form of universal suffrage across class, race, religion, gender and sexual orientation. The price paid in human life, famous, collective and unknown, would be cast aside and replaced by the erosion of rights for certain communities, ethnic groups and those who come to be branded “dissidents.”
Historians sometimes refer to periods colloquially as Ages, for example the Age of Imperialism, 1760 to 1914. We have, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, been living in the Age of Democracy, and perhaps, from a historical point of view, it is time for this Age to end. Either “the Democratic Experiment” has failed, leaving us to an authoritarian future despite all the hardship endured to make that experiment accessible to all, or we can emulate the tenacity of those who built it, and work towards the most ethical, responsible, inclusive and transparent form of democracy, and of society as a whole, to ensure that “the will of the people” is never coerced into authoritarianism.
