Abstract
Liberal, representative democracies are being “dissed.” Their citizens are increasingly discontent, disillusioned, and disgruntled with it and distrustful, despairing, and deprecating of it. Why this situation exists (and is likely to persist) and what might be its consequences provide the twin foci of this essay. It is argued that this widespread crisis of ‘real-existing democracy’ (RED) is the compound product of two converging trends—one endogenous to its practice and the other coming from its exogenous environment. The first is responsible for the growing discontent of its citizens with their representatives; the second is the result of the increasing anomie of its social structures. RED has gone through many crises in the past and there is no reason to despair about its future—although the present context has some especially menacing features. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the sort of reforms that might lead to a “post-liberal’ form of democracy.
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Notes
In this essay, democracy does not refer to the real semantic thing, i.e., “rule by or of the people,” but to the closest practical approximation of this, namely, “Real-Existing Democracy” (RED). Elsewhere, I have argued that it should be called “Politocracy”, i.e., rule by politicians who claim to be ruling for the people.
Great Britain is the prototype; France is the antitype.
Mill (1898).
Google the concept, “political distrust,” and you will get 13,300,000 hits (12/06/17). Moreover, most of the items seem to refer to its contemporary manifestations.
The concept was introduced into modern social science by Emile Durkheim where it was initially used to explain suicide—especially its “altruistic” version. Whether its intrusion into contemporary political analysis will lead to the conclusion that RED will destroy itself altruistically remains to be seen. Durkheim (1951).
Perhaps not coincidentally, this description of the anomic citizen/subject almost perfectly tracks the “model of individual behavior” postulated by rational choice theorists. He or she is postulated to act only according to his or her own preferences without regard for any collective social identity or historical memory, to seek opportunistically to maximize only his or her own immediate marginal gain, and to regard all other participants as hostile competitors, i.e., acting with similar self-regarding motives.
The absence of such a finding may have something to do with the absence in the tradition of survey research of an explicit indicator for anomie. The recent development of scholarly interest in “social capital” (the absence of which might be a reasonable surrogate for anomie) should correct for this empirical deficiency.
Here, I would have referred the reader to the immense literature on “leadership” if I thought it would be useful. I have not found it so.
Maier (2013).
Schmitter (1995a).
Schmitter (1995b).
It also has another name: epistocracy, and a recent book by an American scholar extolling its virtures: Brennan (2016).
Dahl (1989).
Schmitter (2000).
This is mindful of the work of David Mitrany and his “functionalist” assumption that, eventually, national territorial and cultural identities would be displaced by what he later called a “Working Peace” system of trans-national functional problem-solving institutions that would subsume these previous identities. Mitrany (1933). Also his Mitrany (1966).
Germani (1978).
Dahl (1999).
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Schmitter, P.C. ‘Real-Existing’ Democracy and Its Discontents: Sources, Conditions, Causes, Symptoms, and Prospects. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 4, 149–163 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-019-00120-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-019-00120-6