Democracy must be actively maintained to remain strong. Yet few nations train their citizens in the skills needed to keep democratic practices and public accountability strong. This failure benefits interest groups who work to erode democratic responsiveness to the needs of the public, and instead fight for narrow interests.
Much attention has been centered on coup attempts and other dramatic events when anti-democratic groups, individuals, or even political parties attempt to end democratic systems. Yet the successes (as in Myanmar) or failures (as in the United States) to overthrown electoral systems are shaped by long-term struggles to erode or defend democracies.
While academic scholars of democratic governance have not given the gradual erosion of democratic practices much attention, there is a sizeable amount of analysis of the toxic practices that eat away at democracies. Just in the past ten years historians and political scientists Anne Applebaum, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, William Dobson, and others have written about the U.S. context, while Richard Taylor, Gene Sharp, Bruce Jenkins, and Stephen Zunes have complete books in English about the same problems globally; many others have contributed work in other languages on the ways that democracies are eroded.
The problems that the U.S. now faces are not new. And they do not start or end with President Trump.
There is much that supporters of democracy can do to fight forces that erode democratic accountability and get it back on its feet.
When a political party turns against electoral equality, as the Democratic Party did after 1877 and as the Republican party in the United States has in 2021, then the nation can defend against internal threats to the democratic process. A 2013 Supreme Court decision in the United States weakened the land mark 1965 Voting Rights Act that attempted to respond to decades of Jim Crow voter disenfranchisement. More recently Republican legislators in the United States have made over 300 proposals in nearly every state just in the past few months to limit access to voting, penalize those who try to support voters, and weaken the voices of voters.
When the Alternative for Germany party took clear anti-immigrant and anti-Islam positions that rejected rights to vote for those groups, for example, the German government began to consider exercising its “defensive democracy” constitutional provisions. These provisions were added to the German constitution after World War II to make it possible to investigate and ban political parties that threaten the democratic order, as Hitler’s political party did before the war began.
Not all nations have established ways to defend against internal threats to democracy like those in Germany’s constitution. Yet democratic systems are notoriously vulnerable to capture by narrow interests, by anti-democratic forces.
Policy makers in the U.S. have responded in 2020 with the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would correct some of the weaknesses introduced before Trump became President, and in 2021 after the January 6 attempted coup with the For the People Act. Yet the likelihood of either of these bills being passed by both houses, where the Republicans still remain strong, is very low.
Direct attacks on electoral democracy have eroded democratic accountability of elected leaders to voters in the United States. Yet these problems persist not only in the United States and Myanmar, but in many other major democracies: India, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, and others. One major analysis of the varieties of democracy has even developed a category of electoral democracy which function as autocracies, the “electoral autocracy,” and recently downgraded India to this category.
As voters lose faith in their governments, they sometimes turn to practice other types of democracies. Long-established assembly forms of governance have also proven very durable under decades and even centuries of pressure by hostile, anti-democratic forces. Practiced by long-standing Indigenous communities, such as the Haudesaunee or Iroquois, successful social movements, such as the Zapatistas and the Landless Workers Movement, and such global organizations as Via Campesina, these democratic structures use consensus rather than voting to decentralize decision-making power.
Democracy is healthy when its governing mechanisms are responsive to the will of the people. The United States and many other nations have a long way to go to achieve that goal. As adrienne maree brown argues, “we--Americans—don’t know how to do democracy. We don’t know how to make decisions together, how to create generative compromises, how to advance policies that center justice.” Brown’s point is that most social movements only know how to “advance false solutions, things we can get corporate or governmental agreement on, which don’t actually get us where we need to be.” (52)
For Brown democracy must come to mean more than what elected leaders want, since the electoral system has been captured by the financial interests that fund electoral campaigns. In her vision for democracy, democratic compromise is not limited by that which seems possible in the world as we now know it but must respond imaginatively to a need for justice beyond the possible. (17-19, 31)
The central place of the imagination and of love in these democratic practices require new visions and different skills. They also result in a politics that is unrecognizable to those who can only conceive of democracy as an electoral system practiced first in Europe and the U.S. and then globally. As more liberal democracies erode into electoral autocracies, time will tell how the people will reclaim their rightful central role in the decision-making that shapes their lives.
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