The End of Modern Democracy

I promise I will get back to regular programming… but, for obvious reasons this feels like an important moment in time to take focus elsewhere.

Even before this election I’ve been trying to put words together to a feeling about my observations about the world we find ourselves in. Clearly things have dramatically changed from my youth where I witnessed the fall of the Wall and saw my friends begin to jet around to world traveling to far away places opening doors for themselves and for my imagination. There was promise, there was youthful excitement. Now, I’m old and I’m staring into the face of a second Trump presidency. And worse, another crushing defeat of another more than capable women who undoubtably would’ve moved to world forward and into the right direction. At least toward the values I hold dear and wish for all humanity.

What I certainly won’t do is give credit to the brilliance and smarts of Trump. And I won’t give that him for ‘ending Democracy’ as the title might suggest. But as it so often is, when trying to find words and put thoughts together, someone smarter comes along and sort of does it for you. Lenz Jacobsen, co-host of my favorite podcast ‘Servus. Grüezi. Hallo.’ wrote an essay this morning in ‘Die Zeit’, one of Germany’s most important newspapers titled ‘So langsam dämmert’s’ (It’s slowly dawning). I linked the article here (paywalled, but maybe the gift link works). And I linked the auto-translated version of the article as PDF here.

In his essay Lenz summarizes an explanation (without immediately jumping to overly optimistic roll-up-your-sleeves solutions – we’re certainly not there yet!) of why liberal parties aren’t able to connect with voters anymore and why populists are winning in all western democracies. Something I’ve been wresting with for some time now.

A mostly unspoken and therefore all the more powerful belief of liberal democratic consciousness so far is that democracy is stabilizing itself and getting better and better on its own. The political theorist Veith Selk calls this “progression thesis”. We believe, to put it simply, firstly, that the liberal extension of civil rights and opportunities for participation in democracies cannot be reversed because people are getting used to it and no longer want to give it away. Secondly, we believe that only liberal democracy is able to adequately solve all the problems of modernity, and thus the state of the world, so to speak, with the mode of its processing, the political system, grows. The third, and perhaps most important, is a positive image of man: citizens are becoming more and more educated and competent, which is why they can deal with all the upheavals, demands and losses that the present demands of them, confidently and democratically.

Clearly, we’re realizing, especially after this election result in the US, that this isn’t happening, or not happening anymore. Partly due to what the author explains further down in the article:

The power of unelected experts and bureaucrats is increasing, the promise of a truly representative democracy with elite control, accountability and popular sovereignty is being undermined. In addition, there is the end of the promise of economic progress that children will have a better time; digitization with its many new counter-publicities, which make a common public opinion-forming process impossible; an accelerating ecological catastrophe that acts as the final proof of the overstraining of politics and its processes.

So, there, that’s where we’re at. That’s the edge of the abyss. We’re looking into the void. And there’s no easy fix. But it’s worth acknowledging the place in time we find ourselves at.

Welcome to the future, baby!