Monitory Democracy? The Secret History of Democracy since 1945

Abstract

This chapter proposes a fundamental revision of the way we think about democracy in our times. Its starting point is the observation that the history that is closest to us is always the hardest to fathom: the living characters, institutions and events that shape our daily lives like to keep their secrets, to hide their long-term historical significance by submerging us in a never ending flow of random developments, which impair our sense of perspective and weaken our ability to understand where we have been, what we are currently doing and where we may be heading. This knack of recent history to hide its significance from us, its ability to pass cleverly unnoticed right under our noses, is the target of this chapter. It tries to tell a secret. It pinpoints an epochal transformation, which for some decades has been taking place in the contours and dynamics of democracy, without much comment or conceptualization. It reveals something striking: from roughly the mid-twentieth century, representative democracy as our parents and grandparents experienced it has been morphing into a new historical form of democracy. The chapter rejects dead or zombie descriptors such as ‘liberal democracy’, ‘capitalist democracy’ or ‘Western democracy’.