Democracy and the decline of elites[i]

Yanina Welp

“Is [American] democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking.” So begins How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The first English edition was published in 2018 and quickly gained global attention; the book has been translated into several languages and has become a political science bestseller. Donald Trump’s rise to the United States presidency paved the way for this looming question to take on worldwide significance. But the success of the book is not only due to its connection with an issue of growing global concern, but also to the quality of a data-rich, well-narrated text in defence of a very concrete argument: the centrality of intra-elite tolerance and containment to sustaining democracy. The book’s virtues have been widely recognised. Here I would like to address three limitations I observe in the argument and which I believe prevent an accurate approach to the problem of the decline of democracy, in the United States and elsewhere. First, an analysis excessively attached to institutional performance in a narrow sense or, in other words, one that ignores or minimizes the problem of the provision of well-being and the question of the effective protection of human rights. Second, an elitist vision of democracy: according to the authors, almost everything depends on the formal and informal rules of tolerance and containment in the hands of the elites (the citizenry remains an unwanted guest). And third, an ethnocentric view of the American institutional framework, already suggested by that “we never thought we’d be asking” that begins the book.

A focus on institutional performance restricted to formal rules and the behavior of certain actors

Drawing on examples such as Venezuela, Poland and Hungary, Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that democracies today are no longer attacked as in the past, since military coups and other usurpations of power by violent means are rare. “Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 10). What has caused this regression? According to the authors, it is generally accepted that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. For them, this is the central problem, the pathology that afflicts democracies. Accordingly, “an essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 11). If good institutional designs and effective checks and balances form a pillar of good democracy, the other pillar is made up of two norms that allow the system to function properly “in ways we have come to take for granted: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 11). That is where, according to the authors, the problem that plagues American democracy originates: an extreme political polarization that allowed Trump’s emergence and has eroded the hitherto solid democratic culture of the country. The argument is illustrated with several cases observed in other countries, such as the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or that of Alberto Fujimori in Peru. What happened in these two South American countries? According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, the elites failed. But they did not fail because they did not know how to listen to the claims of sectors of society fed up with inequality and corruption, or because they did not know how to respond to the demands for institutional reform on which various analysts have reflected in such detail in the Venezuelan case[ii]. According to the authors, “A lethal mix of ambition, fear, and miscalculation conspired to lead them to the same fateful mistake: willingly handing over the keys of power to an autocrat-in-the-making.” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 14).

The “sort of devil’s bargain” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 15) is the key in this analysis. For them, there is a world divided into good and bad people. The former are embodied in political parties (“political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers”, Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 17), and the bad ones are embodied in authoritarian individuals, psychologically prone to accumulating power and breaking the rules.

The two scholars propose four indicators to identify what types of candidates tend to test positive for authoritarianism. “We should worry when a politician: 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 18). This is a good exercise when analyzing political parties around the world, since more than a few rate badly on one point or another (the People’s Party in Spain, for example, would score badly on some points). It is obviously a matter of degree. The critical issue, in my opinion, is not here but rather in the focussing of the whole argument on the characteristics and aptitudes of the leaders and all possibilities for “salvation” in the ability of the elites not to let these leaders come to power, a conceptual proposal that is reductionist from various points of view and also essentialist with regard to the majority of those who could be defined as “good”.

Let me return to the issue of mutual toleration and forbearance as norms for interaction between political elites. According to the authors, in the US “partisan conflict was so ferocious that many feared the new republic would fail. It was only gradually, over the course of decades, that America’s opposing parties came to the hard-fought recognition that they could be rivals rather than enemies, circulating in power rather than destroying each other. This recognition was a critical foundation for American democracy” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 60). They succeeded after the Civil War and the establishment of laws limiting the political rights of the black population. The authors are very critical of these laws but nevertheless see them as a collateral evil and not as a fact closely linked to the intra-elite consensus: in my view, this exclusion is fundamental to the possibility of elite agreement.

The barrier to preventing leaders with authoritarian tendencies from coming to power lies, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt, in the rules for selecting candidates. For the authors, a key turning point came in 1972, when, following the recommendations of the McGovern-Fraser Commission, both the Democratic and Republican parties adopted the primary system. The primaries opened the doors to external candidacies, despite the fact that, as a kind of safeguard, the figure of the “superdelegate” was included - highly criticized as undemocratic even by other US analysts - with the aim of not losing control by the party’s elites over nominations. Added to this change in institutional design are two others: the growing power of money in campaigns and the spread and massive influence of the media. The change of rules and context would explain the emergence of a leader like Trump. But it is worth asking: is the main problem that tolerance and containment are things of the past, or is it that American democracy has been unable to include ever-larger groups of the population?

A Schumpeterian model of democracy

In my opinion, the root of the current political polarization lies not in the inability of the elites to stop Trump (Timothy Snyder, for example, has argued that what Trump does with his actions is yell in the face of the Republicans who are hypocrites, who say to be concerned about human rights or racism but who themselves don’t care[iii]). The underlying problem is the inability of the elites and the system to respond to the demands of the population and demonstrate that politics can change things. And this is another key issue that is not emphasized in the book and that Snyder points out: freedom is highlighted as a supreme value, but if you do not have health or food, what is the use of freedom? And freedom is the freedom of the market. The structural inequality that characterizes the American political system and the growing racism (as a scapegoat for inequality) are the drivers of Trump’s popularity much more than the GOP’s refusal to continue applying the unwritten law of ‘uses and customs’. In other words, the parties long ago gave up trying to develop welfare-oriented public policies and became accustomed to their positions of power, where they remained until one day they had to face the fact that the world had changed. This is especially true for the Republicans, whose electorate is primarily white. This electorate is aware of this and afraid of it: “in 1950, nonwhites constituted barely 10 percent of the U.S. population. By 2014, they constituted 38 percent, and the U.S. Census Bureau projects that a majority of the population will be nonwhite by 2044” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 92). But one should consider that this might not have been an issue for the party, the party’s should ideally be linked to ideas and adapt along time. If a cleavage based not on political programs but on skin color and religion is established and reinforced over time, this is the responsibility of elites who have built their discourse and their action on... racism, machismo and classism. Or, in other words, the idealized tolerance and mutual restraint worked well between white males of the same social class, and now it’s over.

This brings me to the second question that I would like to raise. From this limited vision of the institutional structure and the behaviors of elite actors as the main supports of democracy, Levitsky and Ziblatt devote a chapter (“Gatekeeping in America”, pp. 24-33) to discussing the benefits of a system where the key would seem to be in the screening, in the access control filters. Levistsky and Ziblatt do not support the strongest arguments that Joseph Schumpetter used to reject the expansion of democracy[iv]. But they don’t stray too far away from them either. Elitist democracy is rooted in the American institutional organization at least at the federal level. In any case, while agreeing with the authors on the need for well-designed institutions and the relevance of political actors, I consider that the elitist vision of democracy does not hold, neither in theory nor in practice. Although it is likely that citizens often do not have sufficient information or education, this problem is not solved by preventing democratic participation but by improving the conditions for the formation of public opinion and the exercise of political rights. The wager of leaving everything in the hands of the elites or the experts is an attempt to hide the fact that human capital is distributed according to the level of access to goods and therefore exposes existing inequalities. This is not morally justifiable, nor does the empirical evidence suggest that elite governments are more efficient.

Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, observed that it was essential to provide elections with some kind of “screening” mechanism. But it produces a tension. “An overreliance on gatekeeping is, in itself, undemocratic—it can create a world of party bosses who ignore the rank and file and fail to represent the people. But an overreliance on the “will of the people” can also be dangerous, for it can lead to the election of a demagogue who threatens democracy itself” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 28). The limitation of a commitment to an elitist democracy is that it focuses at the same time on maintaining the procedures of containment and mutual tolerance while lifting the barriers against external agents. The argument becomes almost tautological: “Behind the unraveling of basic norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance lies a syndrome of intense partisan polarization” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 90).

It is hightly illustrative that the authors turn to the case of Chile - “one of Latin America’s most stable and successful democracies over the last three decades” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 118) - as an example of the benefits of these intra-elite agreements that the book proposes as the main antidote to authoritarianism. But it is precisely the Chilean case that reinforces my argument about the blindness of the elites to expanding democracy or even sustaining it on firm foundations, and their inability to promote inclusive public policies, in turn preparing the breeding ground for the crisis. In Chile, agreements among the elite and the strong control that Augusto Pinochet maintained during the initial years of the transition may have brought stability but they also shaped the original sin of the nascent Chilean democracy, built on the constitution of the dictatorship. Recent decades have shown to what extent the blindness of the elites has prevented the implementation of reforms that could sustain that democracy over time. Democracy has not been lost in Chile but it is currently facing a critical juncture. Discontent has grown gradually and become increasingly evident: although existing political parties continue to dominate the scene and the new independent candidacies have not seen great success, what failed to be channeled institutionally burst out from below and around the edges in successive social protests, culminating in the October 2019 unrest. The (limited) institutional performance indicators that for years had put Chile high on the list blew up in the faces of practitioners in certain sectors of political science. Other analysts had already pointed this out with data and in-depth analysis[v]. The crisis of representation was deep, very deep, and the elite did not see it coming, although it did manage to prevent the rise of political outsiders. The emergence of populist leaders is a sign of exhaustion, it is a symptom. I do not deny that it is a very serious problem, but I insist that it is only the tip of the iceberg, although its consequences can be dramatic. Stopping it does not depend on blocking these leaders but on democratically deactivating their discourse by offering alternatives, that is, by “doing politics”.

One creates the standard and from there assesses the world

“If, twenty-five years ago, someone had described to you a country in which candidates threatened to lock up their rivals, political opponents accused the government of stealing the election or establishing a dictatorship, and parties used their legislative majorities to impeach presidents and steal supreme court seats, you might have thought of Ecuador or Romania. You probably would not have thought of the United States”, write Levitsky and Ziblatt (p. 90). The authors give an account of the new American situation. But there is a long list of global violations of democracy that the United States committed throughout the 20th century that are not the subject of the book. It is worth asking whether a red line can be drawn that preserves the benefits of a system internally and at the top, while the same actors who defend domestic politics (without considering that human rights violations against the black population could be a sufficient argument not to consider that democracy as so exemplary) promote a foreign policy plagued by actions contrary to democratic principles and human rights. There was containment and tolerance, yes, for the elite and among the elite. It is not that the authors do not account for this problem, but they minimize it and subordinate it to a narrative of success: “America’s nascent norms soon unraveled, however, over an issue the founders had tried to suppress: slavery.” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 68). There was war, there were winners and losers and extreme polarization. But “Mutual toleration was established only after the issue of racial equality was removed from the political agenda” (Levitsky and Ziblatt, p. 70). Did it disappear because the issue was resolved? No. The elites learned to negotiate by shoving it under the rug. Slavery ended but a series of laws seriously limited the political rights of very specific groups[vi]. Moreover, the norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance were very well established through an exclusionary model. Rich white men seized power and learned to alternate because, in any case, their interests were not so divergent.

A good number of experts and media analysts, including the Nobel Prize for Literature and unsuccessful candidate for president of Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa, have refocused the debate on populism, which they automatically identify with authoritarianism. They have thus washed their hands of serious criticism of the role of the elites - including the intellectuals - in preventing the opening up and effective functioning of democracy. I don’t just mean the limitations of the provision of public services but also the protection of human rights in practice and not just in theory. This limited vision is what leads to focussing, for instance, all criticism of Peronism in Argentina on the institutional dimension, leaving aside the provision of well-being - the unquestionable advance of the agenda of labor rights and social inclusion - while not paying much attention to the context before and after. I do not maintain that the first government of Juan D. Perón acted strictly in respect of the rules of democracy; it is evident that the dispute to control the institutions was fierce. But which democratic elites let the authoritarian leader pass? None. A decontextualized and self-interested evaluation of complex historical processes allows the Argentine leader to be attacked by turning a blind eye to the structural conditions that allowed for his emergence, while minimizing his contribution to the expansion of rights.

Michael Ignatieff argues that human rights have been a great global advance and that the world would be much worse without them, but it cannot be ignored that the discourse of human rights is an elite discourse, since for people in impoverished and forgotten areas of the world, human rights do not help to solve the problems of their daily life nor to effectively defend those rights[vii]. I insist, and Ignatieff insists on this too: it is not a question of denying the value of what has been achieved (the world would be much worse without these principles) but rather of highlighting their insufficiency and the need to expand them and make them effective: it is a matter of seriously advancing the human rights agenda. Thus, there is hypocrisy in Europe theoretically raising the flag of human rights while on the island of Lesbos (Greece), immigrants, including many kids, live in situations of extreme vulnerability. And there is hypocrisy in erecting the United States as a model democracy while institutional violence is carried out against the black population and against poor immigrants in general.

In a conversation about Europe, Hamid Dabashi and Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou pointed out that there is something incestuous in the way that Europe and European thinkers think of themselves, as if Europe were not a global invention but something unique to Europeans. They argue for the central role that “selective amnesia” has played in the construction of the idea of Europe as the cradle and home of universal values and as a measure of truth. I believe that these arguments - and I am no longer just referring to the book I commented on in the previous sections of this article - also apply to the idea of the United States as a model and patron of democracy. Dabashi contends that when looking at Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders, he observes in their evolution parallels with the European dictators who emerged in the heat of the World Wars. You don’t have to go to Eastern Europe or anywhere in Asia, Africa or Latin America in search of metaphors to understand them. The same is true in the United States: when Trump came to power, American liberals sarcastically compared his country to a “Banana Republic”. “First they coin a racist term like ‘a Banana Republic’ without taking into account the fact that their own democracy has been fundamental to sustaining tyrannies around the world and then when they want to rule out a corrupt madness like Trump, they have to go to America Latina in search of a metaphor”[viii]. Democracies die when they are not effective, when they exclude, and when their elites are unable to look at them critically and act to reform them. It is time to make a deeper and more complete statement of what democracies need in order not to die.

READ ALSO the commentary by Arjun Appadurai for the AHCD website on "The Revolt of the Elites"

References:

[i]           This article was originally written in Spanish and published by Nueva Sociedad, no. 290, 2020. The book referred to is Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. (New York: Crown, 2018).

[ii]          See, for example, Thais Maingon, Carmen Baralt Pérez and Heinz Sonntag, “La batalla por una nueva constitución para Venezuela”, Revista Mexicana de Sociología vol. 62, no. 4 (Oct-Dec 2000), pp. 91-124. This study gives a good account of the argument to which I adhere more generally in this work. The authors affirm that “the leaders of the two major political parties: Democratic Action (AD) and the Independent Political Electoral Organization Committee (Copei), decided - in a clear sign of their lack of vision for the future and their temporary blindness - to suspend the debate of the Bicameral Commission in September 1992” (p. 93). The authors see in this unwillingness to define the necessary institutional changes the blind spot that allowed Chávez to come to power.

[iii]         In the first episode of the Podcast Democracy in Question, produced by the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy (Graduate Institute) and the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna and conducted by Shalini Randeria, Timothy Snyder says “So, what Trump did was he basically called the Republicans out on all their hypocrisy. He said, ‘You don’t really care about black people and immigrants. You’re just pretending. You don’t really care about opportunity for all, you’re just pretending. What we really care about is bullying people, that’s what we really care about’”.  Available at  https://pod.link/1533272025/episode/OTRjYjNlMGItOTE4ZC00ZDg2LTkxZTItMjBiYzQ1YTcwMzhk

[iv]         For Schumpeter, the average citizen of modern democracies “is [...] incapable of action, except the stampede, which barely departs from its private concerns and penetrates the field of politics descends to a lower level of mental performance, where the Individual volition, factual knowledge, and inference used in the family are notably diminished. […] More rationality is used in a game of ‘bridge’ than in a political discussion between non-politicians”. Schumpeter, Joseph A. ([1961] 2015). Capitalismo, socialismo y democracia. Ed. Página Indómita.

[v]          Rossana Castiglioni and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser edited a special issue in the Journal of Politics in Latin America: “Challenges to Political Representation in Contemporary Chile”, which gave an account of this crisis in 2017. Claudia Heiss summarized the constitutional crisis in ¿Por qué necesitamos una nueva constitución? (Madrid: Aguilar, 2020).

[vi]         This is explained in detail on pages 146 ff.

[vii]        Michael Ignatieff, The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017)

[viii]       “Beyond Europe and eurocentrism. A conversation between Hamid Dabashi and Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou”, https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/communications/news/beyond-europe-and-eurocentrism