Today I attended in New York, at Columbia University (which still looks a bit like a fortress because of the students protests that took place there about 1.5 years ago) a conference at the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Institute for Policy Dialogue.
Prof Branko, the intellectuals in America are overwhelmingly disciples of Classical theory of democracy (Schumpeter describes the Classical doctrine in his book). Classical theory of democracy is as obsolete as classical theory of atom in physics. Schumpeter also describes four requisites under which Classical democracy can work. But they have long vanished from America. Yet American intellectuals continue to worship the corpse of classical doctrine.
I have written much about theory of Democracy. Here's my latest article.
According to Guardian: "the overwhelming majority of people in the world – between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies – want their governments to take stronger climate action."
you ask "why there is a gap between what most political and social scientists believe is desirable, and what normal people who participate in the process find attractive." In 2009 the french sociologist Didier Eribon, blending Bourdieu with Foucault, tried to answer this question with his book "Returning to Reims". One of the main reasons for the gap Eribon identfies is the betrayal of the Mitterand government in the Eighties which Eribon sees as a role model for the subsequent neoliberalization of the french left (and maybe of the european left). Eribon described this process as follows: "The socialist left set out on a major project of transformation, one that became more and more marked as the years went by. With a suspicious degree of enthusiasm, they started to turn to neoconservative intellectuals for guidance. Those intellectuals, pretending to offer a way to renovate leftist thought, in fact set out to eliminate all that was leftist from the left. What actually occurred was a general and quite thoroughgoing metamorphosis of the ethos of the party as well as of its intellectual references. Gone was any talk of exploitation and resistance, replaced by talk of “necessary modernization’’ and of “radical social reform”; gone the references to relations between the classes, replaced by talk of a “life in common”; gone any mention of unequal social opportunities, replaced by an emphasis on “individual responsibility.” And further on: "The parties of the left, along with party intellectuals and state intellectuals, began from this moment forward to think and speak the language of those who govern, no longer the language of those who are governed. They spoke in the name of the government (and as part of it), no longer in the name of the governed (and as part of them). And so of course they adopted a governing point of view on the world, disdainfully dismissing (and doing so with great discursive violence, a violence that was experienced as such by those at whom it was directed) the point of view of those being governed".
The political and and social scientists you refer to in your question above are the mandarins of the bourgeois left.
Thanks for sharing this. Excellently written. And true: I think the Mitterand's govt, no less than Clinton/Blair's is emblematic of the left's ideological espousal of neoliberalism.
«Gone was any talk of exploitation and resistance, replaced by talk of “necessary modernization’’ and of “radical social reform”; gone the references to relations between the classes, replaced by talk of a “life in common”; gone any mention of unequal social opportunities, replaced by an emphasis on “individual responsibility.”»
There were two main reasons for that, and the first and most simplistic is that the "whig" oligarchs realized that like in the USA what matters is not for which candidates people vote, or who counts the votes given to the candidates, but in a *representative* democracy (that "representative" should as a rule be explicit to make it clear) what matters most is who nominates the candidates, because they owe their election to those who nominate them first and foremostly.
But the bigger and more important reason emerges from asking why the oligarchs found it so easy to nominate candidates of the neoliberal right in the formerly "left" parties:
* In many countries the "proper" left represented the interests of working class people in particular those who depended *entirely* on their employer's wages for their income, including many "middle-class" people
* In the social-democratic decades after WW2 many people, both from the "middle class" and from the "aristocracy" of the working class, made enough money to buy cheap property and cars and became entitled to defined benefits pensions or accumulated significant share-based retirement funds.
* Most of them had supported or were members or officials of "left" parties and labor unions and had fought for more equality when inequality was unfavorable to them, but having acquired property and shares as sources of rent, they started to regard themselves as primarily "petty bourgeoisie" and demanded more inequality in their own favor, switching from an alliance with the working class to one with the upper class.
The parties of the "left" and "left" organizations like the labor unions had two choices:
#1 Continue to represent the same cohort of voters even if those voters had switched from social-democracy to neoliberalism (PASOKification).
#2 Let their existing voters switch to existing neoliberal parties and continue to represent the interests of the working class and the interests of those who want more equality.
In "the west" most parties of the "left" and labor unions chose option #1; I think because most of the officials and leaders of those parties and labor unions realized that their own class interests were no longer those of the working class and did not want to move to other parties and restart their careers there and abandon control of the parties of "the left" and labor unions to "socialists".
I am not a scientist, so I'll just write some unscientific things that came to my mind while reading the article.
This voting thing, going to the polling station and casting a vote, can be viewed as a ritual. Every few years the citizenry partakes in the great festival where they affirm the values of the society and by doing so ensure the next cycle of prosperity.
However, it seems that for a lot of people this ritual hasn't been working for quite some time. So some started saying that the priests (you call them differently) weren't doing their job properly.
This wasn't taken seriously, so only spin–doctors were brought to deal with the maladie, but their medicine was misapplied. And it's questionable whether they have a medicine which could treat the root causes.
Of course, better plans were made and spin–doctors were only meant to buy the time, but all those plans failed, for one reason or another. So some people started saying that gods have abandoned us.
Now, that is a serious problem. You see, these rituals, aside from ensuring the next prosperous cycle, also serve to affirm the identity of the tribe. And when the identity is shaken, all kinds of unexplainable, allegedly irrational things start to happen.
The priests couldn't understand, by definition (almost), so they sent more spin–doctors. Which produced the oposite effect of what was intended and the tribe was split. A lot of people started to search for identity elsewhere.
It is known that the priests mediate between ordinary people and higher powers (you may call them gods or you may call them "our democracy," according to the manner of speech of a particular tribe) and it has become obvious, to a really large number of people, that the rituals don't work any more. And that the priests aren't managing to do their jobs properly. After all, they had various kinds of privileges in exchange for ensuring the next cycle of prosperity. That is also known.
———
It is incredible, at least to my non–scientific self, how people whom you call scientists manage to completely avoid the question of identity and spend enormous amounts of time and energy debating other things. Which is, one might say, a ritual that's trying to ensure that this particular cellar stays sealed.
"It means that one out of each two people with the right to vote is indifferent as to who might rule him or her"
Having lived and worked alongside these US non-voters, I can assure you it isn't indifference so much as cynicism. "Both parties are corrupt, nobody actually represents me."
I personally have encouraged people to still cast a ballot, but vote for a 3rd party, a write-in, or cast a blank ballot, to indicate your vote is not being won.
But I also understand why so many Biden voters could not vote for either Trump or Harris in the midst of the genocide in Gaza. Especially the Arab Americans in swing states who stayed home.
Undoubtedly it is cynicism. But it is noteworthy that in the mid-20th century there was very little cynicism (in the US) about the good faith and good intentions of politicians, but citizen interest in politics was not significantly higher than it is today. Even in the golden age of low-temperature, bipartisan, consensus politics, the late 1950s and the early pre-Vietnam 1960s, the lack of interest was already there to the same degree. (In 1964, some 77% of US citizens said they trusted government to do what is right "just about always or most of the time", and the same figure last May was 22%.)
In 1964, the political scientist Philip Converse wrote an article titled "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics", which is a minor classic of both political science and social psychology (cited tens of thousands of times in subsequent scholarship), but which is seemingly little known elsewhere. Based on interviews he had done between 1956 and 1960, Converse stated that "the contextual grasp of 'standard' political belief systems fades out very rapidly, almost before one has passed beyond the 10% of the American population that in the 1950s had completed standard college training. Increasingly, simpler forms of information about 'what goes with what' (or even information about the simple identity of objects) turn up missing."
By "what goes with what" he meant things like knowing what political positions are characteristic of liberalism and which of conservatism; and by "the simple identity of objects", things like knowing the name of one's own congressman, and of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and knowing which party controls Congress. About this last, for instance, he estimated that close to 70% did not know – which of course means that a large share of even those who DID bother to vote did not know.
Based on how the same randomly selected respondents answered a cross-section of typical high-profile "yes/no" questions on policy preferences in two interviews only two years apart, Converse wrote: "Faced with the typical item of this kind, only about thirteen people out of twenty manage to locate themselves even on the same side of the controversy in successive interrogations, when ten out of twenty could have done so by chance alone." He concluded that "large portions of an electorate do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial periods of time".
I'm not drawing attention to this because I want to deny what you were saying. Of course Arab-Americans not voting for Biden is a perfectly real phenomenon, etc. But I have two points: 1) indifference towards politics does not require current levels of cynicism, since the indifference was already there at a time when the cynicism was missing; and 2) factors such as anger about the war in Gaza are liable to be overestimated at the expense of factors such as not even knowing there's a war in Gaza, or which continent Gaza is even in.
Your popular but 'wrong' parties were and are all uninterested in, indeed hostile to, the rights of minorities (political opponents but especially ethnic minorities). Many came to power on the basis of this hostility, which is of course a strong force. But what are the consequences of using and encouraging that force?
While Schumpeter does not mention it, a core idea of liberal democracy is not about the majority but about the protection of these minorities. If one is uninterested in this (as you may be since you don't mention it), then you can be relaxed about democracies ruled by 'wrong' parties. But these will be illiberal democracies and you will in fact have the luxury of being relaxed only if you are not of a minority group. If you are from a minority group, you will be much less relaxed, persecuted and may end up incarcerated in a gulag, or killed in a variety of ways.
I think it's fine to berate liberals for living in a parallel unreal world, and to point out the failures of liberal democracy in practice, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The definition of democracy, as protector of minorities, is fine (and obviously more demanding than Schumpeter's). The key problem, in my opinion, is not what we shall define as democracy but that significant groups of people or often majorities do not want to choose such-defined democracies. The liberal explanation is that people are somehow either morally flawed or misinformed. But that, IMO, clearly cannot be a valid explanation.
Well I agree with your last point. But in surveying the culture wars, take care not to get caught up in them yourself. I think you caricature many social scientists. Trying to understand people voting for illiberal parties in terms of loss of relative social and economic status and a feeling of abandonment by established parties, is not the same as making moral judgements. These are explanations that understand people as rational but social actors who in many cases have not done well out of capitalist liberal democracies. These political scientists see the illiberal parties as anti-system parties (viz Jonathan Hopkins), not as 'wrong'. If anything, these lines of explanation are sympathetic, or at least are more clear-headed about the nature of the crisis than the standard liberal response. If you have better explanations, then by all means share them.
For every careful, thoughtful political scientist of the sort you describe there are n-many loudmouthed "liberal" political actors who pollute the public discourse with precisely the sort of scorn and derision to which Branko refers.
In the West we had achieved a pretty good liberal culture of respect for minorities. The root cause for the unfortunate recent backtrack and rise of illiberal and intolerant parties IMO lies with over-educated and narcissistic intellectual elites, who went completely bonkers. Extreme woke-ism, cancel culture, invention of new suppressed minorities (men who want to beat-up women in sports??), sophistic and pretentious excuses for criminal and asocial behavior... These did nothing of substance to help or further minority rights, and the only result is the backlash and backtracking that we see now.
I mean, spoiled Columbia kids, whose parents are paying $60K tuition, are lecturing everyone and calling them bigots over mis-pronoun-ing, etc... That's not liberalism, all it did was to drive backlash...
Protection of minorities could be translated, in a Western context, as unlimited immigration and deracinization, and in the case of Europe, deligitimization of the native people, in favour of ethnic and racial spoils and sectarian division and party power broking.
Thus, protection of minorities, and democratic liberalism itself, become deeply unpopular.
Depressing read from but which ignores limitations of Schumpeter's definition and (relatedly) the boundary problem. According to Schumpeter's definition , apartheid S Africa was democratic, similarly, Netanyahu described as "fully democratically elected" rules over many voteless people. The lack of attention to who constitutes the demos is widely seen as a reductio of Schumpeter's approach.
Further: climate change cannot be tackled without international co-operation. Since this is a necessary condition for avoiding disaster, fighting to achieve it should not be deterred by the unlikelihood of success. I think Branko has faith in tech solutions emerging, ie in magic. I think this reveals a deep inconsistency in his views: he berates liberal internationalists for their lack of realism and urges them to focus on reality, but when it comes to some of these problems, he himself can only offer the irrational hope that something will turn up.
This may seem off topic, but I am reminded of Zola novels which capture so well the behavior of people at the end of an age, when society turns from one fashion to another. For me it was Nana, for others it was Le Débâcle. The elders of the ancien régime can't accept the reality of a new world and continue, sadly and resolutely, living in the ever decreasing old one.
In his book “The idea of Justice” Amartya Sen contrasts an institutional based perspective of justice with a comprehensive outcomes based view of justice. (I am simplifying, best to read his book.) I think there is a similar distinction between an institutional based perspective of democracy and a comprehensive outcomes based view of democracy. If we take the later perspective, it is possible to see why democracy is in trouble in so much of the West that conflates democracy with a particular set of “liberal institution”. Whereas China’s “whole-process people’s democracy”
has the merit of focusing on comprehensive outcomes. Do people in fact have a broadly equal say in social choice? Or does social choice predominantly reflect the preferences of an elite (usually capitalist) class!
«why democracy is in trouble in so much of the West that conflates democracy with a particular set of “liberal institution”.»
In "the west" there is *representative* democracy, and nominations are far more important than voting.
«Whereas China’s “whole-process people’s democracy” has the merit of focusing on comprehensive outcomes. Do people in fact have a broadly equal say in social choice? Or does social choice predominantly reflect the preferences of an elite (usually capitalist) class!»
The question as to "comprehensive outcomes" is "for whom?", that is whose preferences drive those outcomes: "the west" representative democracy has indeed delivered robust "comprehensive outcomes" for top 20-40% of the population since Reagan/Clinton and Thatcher/Blair.
The same is happening in the PRC, just as it happened in Taiwan and Singapore which have been the economic and political models for the PRC government since Deng: most party and government officials have portfolios of properties and shares and having been trained in the PRC in marxian analysis they are very well aware that they have become "petty bourgeoisie" and their class interest is to boost property and business profits, even if they let the working class have some crumbs.
Note: the middle and upper classes of the "the west" are also marxists to a fault and most believe that their profits depend primarily on extracting as much surplus as possible from the working class via lower wages and higher property rents.
Since left wing academics took over the west's labour parties, dominate media and the academy, replaced hard marxism with more middle class frendly cultural and identitarian 'ideals' as the vehicles for their will to power, it has been necessary for the academic left (which is the majority at basically every western unversity) to consider all wrong-voters to be living in another dimension.
Remember Krugman accusing US voters having a false consciousness when experiencing the glorious US economy.
What an extraordinary butcher cut of the times, with every bone removed! The meal which would benefit especially European politicians if for nothing than for the historical insights which they have forgotten or, worse, of which they are not even aware. The disillusioned observer's lens is commendable in every aspect, Prof. Milanović.
There's no common interest because there are very different views of the good life, across both cultural and subcultural levels.
It's unclear how much of that is actually caused by new media and other trends of this time, vs just being more in our collective face than it was before.
But either way, perhaps going somewhere where one's view is the majority on at many administrative levels as possible is the most reasonable thing to do in this context, for those who can afford it.
And it's clear that if there was a bit less to lose, there would be civil wars and coups all around the developed world by now.
Perhaps a better operational definition of democracy would be ”if a majority thinks the government would do something, it will”.
In that case it is obvious that we don’t have democracies anymore. As one of the commentators said, 75% want the fossile fuels to be phased out, but they aren’t. Another from my country: 80% want the profit motive out of healthcare, but it isn’t.
Internal inequality is rising in almost all countries and it is not that governments try to resist it, they help. Spanish economist Pablo Torija calculated that while in the 70s leftist OECD governments favoured most the 18th percentile, centrist governments favoured most the 50th percentile and rightist governments favored most the 82nd percentile, today they all favour most the 100th. See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2219853. And worse than that, they favour most the richest 0,2 %. Obviously, that is not what a majority wants, but it is what it gets.
Colin Crouch has coined the concept ”post-democracy”. It is not about military governments and fascist storm-troops, it is about not having the levers to make the governments submit to peoples’ priorities.
Crouch himself explain it with the waning power of the trade unions, which – at least in the industrial world – were the repositories of popular agendas. And they lost their power because of ”globalization”: production was outsourced and capitalists began earning money not by organizing production chains but by owning assets they rent out. They became rentiers. And in a rentier society there is no need for people as there is in industrial capitalism.
American presidential elections actually make sense in terms of the collective results. If the incumbent president is unpopular, he or his party loses. If he is popular then he wins. If he is popular but is not running, then the party with the dispensation wins.
At present, the Reagan dispensation is still operative. Thus, if Trump is popular in 2028, his party wins, if not then Democrats win. If the Democrat who wins is popular in 2032, he gets a second term. If not Republicans win and it's the end of democracy. In 2036, if we still have a Republican dispensation (as seems likely) Republicans win and democracy ends then.
Now would be a good time to discuss how we are going to get a dispensation like FDR did to prevent this from happening.
Democracy is basically the ability to choose and inevitably people make the 'wrong' decisions and sometimes win. This is why democracies are inherently unstable compared to dictatorships or aristocracies, and as you say, it is why democracy can lead to the latter. So the 'double movement' can result in an FDR, a Lenin or a Hitler. Well if you want 'human agency' that's life, but I know which system we should strive for.
Do democracies automatically address people's concerns? No, which is why people are kicking off about the results of technocratic governance etc. But whilst democracies won't address people's concerns in and of themselves, they are invariably required to do so. The mistake is to think there is a magic bullet – there isn't – we've got to try to do stuff better. What constitutes 'better'? That is contingent, in other words you are in the realm of debate and morals, politics, political economy etc.
Why repeat the obviously false assertion that Western state are democracies because the elect there preselected leaders democratically when warrior bands have been doing exactly that for 40,000 years? Mongols famously lifted a siege in Europe in order to get home in time for one such election.
Not one warrior imagined that he lived in a democracy because he voted and nor should we because, as President Lincoln's Attorney General, Lincoln’s Secretary of State observed, “We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”.
Our Presidents hire and fire all senior officials, secretly ban fifty thousand citizens from flying, order people kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated and take the country to war. No Chinese leader, not even Mao at his peak, could do any of those things.
Though there is no consensus about what “democracy” means, to the extent that a definition is required, democracy is a political system where the political unit in question is run broadly as desired by the people who reside in it.
Comparing the constitutional, participative, elective, consultative, legislative, operational, substantive, and financial elements of big-state American and Chinese democracies, we can see the differences. In the Confucian tradition, geniuses have always led the nation by moral example, but beyond beneficial infrastructure, they produced few benefits for the rural majority.
Mao updated this tradition in 1945, when he envisioned "a free and democratic China in which all government levels, including the central government, are created by general and equal secret balloting and are responsible to the people who elected them. It will implement Dr. Sun Yat-sen's three principles of democracy, Lincoln's principle of 'of the people, by the people, for the people,' and Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter.
Prof Branko, the intellectuals in America are overwhelmingly disciples of Classical theory of democracy (Schumpeter describes the Classical doctrine in his book). Classical theory of democracy is as obsolete as classical theory of atom in physics. Schumpeter also describes four requisites under which Classical democracy can work. But they have long vanished from America. Yet American intellectuals continue to worship the corpse of classical doctrine.
I have written much about theory of Democracy. Here's my latest article.
https://3rdworldecon.substack.com/p/concept-of-political-legitimacy-and
Thanks. Her is my review of Fritz Bartel's excellent book that you also cite:
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/western-money-and-eastern-promises
Prof. Branko,
According to Guardian: "the overwhelming majority of people in the world – between 80% and 89%, according to a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies – want their governments to take stronger climate action."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2025/apr/23/climate-action-public-support
So , maybe there is some common interest.
best
Miljenko Cimesa
Dear Prof. Milanovic,
you ask "why there is a gap between what most political and social scientists believe is desirable, and what normal people who participate in the process find attractive." In 2009 the french sociologist Didier Eribon, blending Bourdieu with Foucault, tried to answer this question with his book "Returning to Reims". One of the main reasons for the gap Eribon identfies is the betrayal of the Mitterand government in the Eighties which Eribon sees as a role model for the subsequent neoliberalization of the french left (and maybe of the european left). Eribon described this process as follows: "The socialist left set out on a major project of transformation, one that became more and more marked as the years went by. With a suspicious degree of enthusiasm, they started to turn to neoconservative intellectuals for guidance. Those intellectuals, pretending to offer a way to renovate leftist thought, in fact set out to eliminate all that was leftist from the left. What actually occurred was a general and quite thoroughgoing metamorphosis of the ethos of the party as well as of its intellectual references. Gone was any talk of exploitation and resistance, replaced by talk of “necessary modernization’’ and of “radical social reform”; gone the references to relations between the classes, replaced by talk of a “life in common”; gone any mention of unequal social opportunities, replaced by an emphasis on “individual responsibility.” And further on: "The parties of the left, along with party intellectuals and state intellectuals, began from this moment forward to think and speak the language of those who govern, no longer the language of those who are governed. They spoke in the name of the government (and as part of it), no longer in the name of the governed (and as part of them). And so of course they adopted a governing point of view on the world, disdainfully dismissing (and doing so with great discursive violence, a violence that was experienced as such by those at whom it was directed) the point of view of those being governed".
The political and and social scientists you refer to in your question above are the mandarins of the bourgeois left.
Thanks for sharing this. Excellently written. And true: I think the Mitterand's govt, no less than Clinton/Blair's is emblematic of the left's ideological espousal of neoliberalism.
«Gone was any talk of exploitation and resistance, replaced by talk of “necessary modernization’’ and of “radical social reform”; gone the references to relations between the classes, replaced by talk of a “life in common”; gone any mention of unequal social opportunities, replaced by an emphasis on “individual responsibility.”»
There were two main reasons for that, and the first and most simplistic is that the "whig" oligarchs realized that like in the USA what matters is not for which candidates people vote, or who counts the votes given to the candidates, but in a *representative* democracy (that "representative" should as a rule be explicit to make it clear) what matters most is who nominates the candidates, because they owe their election to those who nominate them first and foremostly.
But the bigger and more important reason emerges from asking why the oligarchs found it so easy to nominate candidates of the neoliberal right in the formerly "left" parties:
* In many countries the "proper" left represented the interests of working class people in particular those who depended *entirely* on their employer's wages for their income, including many "middle-class" people
* In the social-democratic decades after WW2 many people, both from the "middle class" and from the "aristocracy" of the working class, made enough money to buy cheap property and cars and became entitled to defined benefits pensions or accumulated significant share-based retirement funds.
* Most of them had supported or were members or officials of "left" parties and labor unions and had fought for more equality when inequality was unfavorable to them, but having acquired property and shares as sources of rent, they started to regard themselves as primarily "petty bourgeoisie" and demanded more inequality in their own favor, switching from an alliance with the working class to one with the upper class.
The parties of the "left" and "left" organizations like the labor unions had two choices:
#1 Continue to represent the same cohort of voters even if those voters had switched from social-democracy to neoliberalism (PASOKification).
#2 Let their existing voters switch to existing neoliberal parties and continue to represent the interests of the working class and the interests of those who want more equality.
In "the west" most parties of the "left" and labor unions chose option #1; I think because most of the officials and leaders of those parties and labor unions realized that their own class interests were no longer those of the working class and did not want to move to other parties and restart their careers there and abandon control of the parties of "the left" and labor unions to "socialists".
I am not a scientist, so I'll just write some unscientific things that came to my mind while reading the article.
This voting thing, going to the polling station and casting a vote, can be viewed as a ritual. Every few years the citizenry partakes in the great festival where they affirm the values of the society and by doing so ensure the next cycle of prosperity.
However, it seems that for a lot of people this ritual hasn't been working for quite some time. So some started saying that the priests (you call them differently) weren't doing their job properly.
This wasn't taken seriously, so only spin–doctors were brought to deal with the maladie, but their medicine was misapplied. And it's questionable whether they have a medicine which could treat the root causes.
Of course, better plans were made and spin–doctors were only meant to buy the time, but all those plans failed, for one reason or another. So some people started saying that gods have abandoned us.
Now, that is a serious problem. You see, these rituals, aside from ensuring the next prosperous cycle, also serve to affirm the identity of the tribe. And when the identity is shaken, all kinds of unexplainable, allegedly irrational things start to happen.
The priests couldn't understand, by definition (almost), so they sent more spin–doctors. Which produced the oposite effect of what was intended and the tribe was split. A lot of people started to search for identity elsewhere.
It is known that the priests mediate between ordinary people and higher powers (you may call them gods or you may call them "our democracy," according to the manner of speech of a particular tribe) and it has become obvious, to a really large number of people, that the rituals don't work any more. And that the priests aren't managing to do their jobs properly. After all, they had various kinds of privileges in exchange for ensuring the next cycle of prosperity. That is also known.
———
It is incredible, at least to my non–scientific self, how people whom you call scientists manage to completely avoid the question of identity and spend enormous amounts of time and energy debating other things. Which is, one might say, a ritual that's trying to ensure that this particular cellar stays sealed.
"It means that one out of each two people with the right to vote is indifferent as to who might rule him or her"
Having lived and worked alongside these US non-voters, I can assure you it isn't indifference so much as cynicism. "Both parties are corrupt, nobody actually represents me."
I personally have encouraged people to still cast a ballot, but vote for a 3rd party, a write-in, or cast a blank ballot, to indicate your vote is not being won.
But I also understand why so many Biden voters could not vote for either Trump or Harris in the midst of the genocide in Gaza. Especially the Arab Americans in swing states who stayed home.
Undoubtedly it is cynicism. But it is noteworthy that in the mid-20th century there was very little cynicism (in the US) about the good faith and good intentions of politicians, but citizen interest in politics was not significantly higher than it is today. Even in the golden age of low-temperature, bipartisan, consensus politics, the late 1950s and the early pre-Vietnam 1960s, the lack of interest was already there to the same degree. (In 1964, some 77% of US citizens said they trusted government to do what is right "just about always or most of the time", and the same figure last May was 22%.)
In 1964, the political scientist Philip Converse wrote an article titled "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics", which is a minor classic of both political science and social psychology (cited tens of thousands of times in subsequent scholarship), but which is seemingly little known elsewhere. Based on interviews he had done between 1956 and 1960, Converse stated that "the contextual grasp of 'standard' political belief systems fades out very rapidly, almost before one has passed beyond the 10% of the American population that in the 1950s had completed standard college training. Increasingly, simpler forms of information about 'what goes with what' (or even information about the simple identity of objects) turn up missing."
By "what goes with what" he meant things like knowing what political positions are characteristic of liberalism and which of conservatism; and by "the simple identity of objects", things like knowing the name of one's own congressman, and of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and knowing which party controls Congress. About this last, for instance, he estimated that close to 70% did not know – which of course means that a large share of even those who DID bother to vote did not know.
Based on how the same randomly selected respondents answered a cross-section of typical high-profile "yes/no" questions on policy preferences in two interviews only two years apart, Converse wrote: "Faced with the typical item of this kind, only about thirteen people out of twenty manage to locate themselves even on the same side of the controversy in successive interrogations, when ten out of twenty could have done so by chance alone." He concluded that "large portions of an electorate do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial periods of time".
I'm not drawing attention to this because I want to deny what you were saying. Of course Arab-Americans not voting for Biden is a perfectly real phenomenon, etc. But I have two points: 1) indifference towards politics does not require current levels of cynicism, since the indifference was already there at a time when the cynicism was missing; and 2) factors such as anger about the war in Gaza are liable to be overestimated at the expense of factors such as not even knowing there's a war in Gaza, or which continent Gaza is even in.
Your popular but 'wrong' parties were and are all uninterested in, indeed hostile to, the rights of minorities (political opponents but especially ethnic minorities). Many came to power on the basis of this hostility, which is of course a strong force. But what are the consequences of using and encouraging that force?
While Schumpeter does not mention it, a core idea of liberal democracy is not about the majority but about the protection of these minorities. If one is uninterested in this (as you may be since you don't mention it), then you can be relaxed about democracies ruled by 'wrong' parties. But these will be illiberal democracies and you will in fact have the luxury of being relaxed only if you are not of a minority group. If you are from a minority group, you will be much less relaxed, persecuted and may end up incarcerated in a gulag, or killed in a variety of ways.
I think it's fine to berate liberals for living in a parallel unreal world, and to point out the failures of liberal democracy in practice, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The definition of democracy, as protector of minorities, is fine (and obviously more demanding than Schumpeter's). The key problem, in my opinion, is not what we shall define as democracy but that significant groups of people or often majorities do not want to choose such-defined democracies. The liberal explanation is that people are somehow either morally flawed or misinformed. But that, IMO, clearly cannot be a valid explanation.
Well I agree with your last point. But in surveying the culture wars, take care not to get caught up in them yourself. I think you caricature many social scientists. Trying to understand people voting for illiberal parties in terms of loss of relative social and economic status and a feeling of abandonment by established parties, is not the same as making moral judgements. These are explanations that understand people as rational but social actors who in many cases have not done well out of capitalist liberal democracies. These political scientists see the illiberal parties as anti-system parties (viz Jonathan Hopkins), not as 'wrong'. If anything, these lines of explanation are sympathetic, or at least are more clear-headed about the nature of the crisis than the standard liberal response. If you have better explanations, then by all means share them.
For every careful, thoughtful political scientist of the sort you describe there are n-many loudmouthed "liberal" political actors who pollute the public discourse with precisely the sort of scorn and derision to which Branko refers.
Of course, but I wouldn't call them political scientists.
Good points, I'd just like to add this:
In the West we had achieved a pretty good liberal culture of respect for minorities. The root cause for the unfortunate recent backtrack and rise of illiberal and intolerant parties IMO lies with over-educated and narcissistic intellectual elites, who went completely bonkers. Extreme woke-ism, cancel culture, invention of new suppressed minorities (men who want to beat-up women in sports??), sophistic and pretentious excuses for criminal and asocial behavior... These did nothing of substance to help or further minority rights, and the only result is the backlash and backtracking that we see now.
I mean, spoiled Columbia kids, whose parents are paying $60K tuition, are lecturing everyone and calling them bigots over mis-pronoun-ing, etc... That's not liberalism, all it did was to drive backlash...
Protection of minorities could be translated, in a Western context, as unlimited immigration and deracinization, and in the case of Europe, deligitimization of the native people, in favour of ethnic and racial spoils and sectarian division and party power broking.
Thus, protection of minorities, and democratic liberalism itself, become deeply unpopular.
Depressing read from but which ignores limitations of Schumpeter's definition and (relatedly) the boundary problem. According to Schumpeter's definition , apartheid S Africa was democratic, similarly, Netanyahu described as "fully democratically elected" rules over many voteless people. The lack of attention to who constitutes the demos is widely seen as a reductio of Schumpeter's approach.
Further: climate change cannot be tackled without international co-operation. Since this is a necessary condition for avoiding disaster, fighting to achieve it should not be deterred by the unlikelihood of success. I think Branko has faith in tech solutions emerging, ie in magic. I think this reveals a deep inconsistency in his views: he berates liberal internationalists for their lack of realism and urges them to focus on reality, but when it comes to some of these problems, he himself can only offer the irrational hope that something will turn up.
This may seem off topic, but I am reminded of Zola novels which capture so well the behavior of people at the end of an age, when society turns from one fashion to another. For me it was Nana, for others it was Le Débâcle. The elders of the ancien régime can't accept the reality of a new world and continue, sadly and resolutely, living in the ever decreasing old one.
In his book “The idea of Justice” Amartya Sen contrasts an institutional based perspective of justice with a comprehensive outcomes based view of justice. (I am simplifying, best to read his book.) I think there is a similar distinction between an institutional based perspective of democracy and a comprehensive outcomes based view of democracy. If we take the later perspective, it is possible to see why democracy is in trouble in so much of the West that conflates democracy with a particular set of “liberal institution”. Whereas China’s “whole-process people’s democracy”
has the merit of focusing on comprehensive outcomes. Do people in fact have a broadly equal say in social choice? Or does social choice predominantly reflect the preferences of an elite (usually capitalist) class!
«why democracy is in trouble in so much of the West that conflates democracy with a particular set of “liberal institution”.»
In "the west" there is *representative* democracy, and nominations are far more important than voting.
«Whereas China’s “whole-process people’s democracy” has the merit of focusing on comprehensive outcomes. Do people in fact have a broadly equal say in social choice? Or does social choice predominantly reflect the preferences of an elite (usually capitalist) class!»
The question as to "comprehensive outcomes" is "for whom?", that is whose preferences drive those outcomes: "the west" representative democracy has indeed delivered robust "comprehensive outcomes" for top 20-40% of the population since Reagan/Clinton and Thatcher/Blair.
The same is happening in the PRC, just as it happened in Taiwan and Singapore which have been the economic and political models for the PRC government since Deng: most party and government officials have portfolios of properties and shares and having been trained in the PRC in marxian analysis they are very well aware that they have become "petty bourgeoisie" and their class interest is to boost property and business profits, even if they let the working class have some crumbs.
Note: the middle and upper classes of the "the west" are also marxists to a fault and most believe that their profits depend primarily on extracting as much surplus as possible from the working class via lower wages and higher property rents.
Since left wing academics took over the west's labour parties, dominate media and the academy, replaced hard marxism with more middle class frendly cultural and identitarian 'ideals' as the vehicles for their will to power, it has been necessary for the academic left (which is the majority at basically every western unversity) to consider all wrong-voters to be living in another dimension.
Remember Krugman accusing US voters having a false consciousness when experiencing the glorious US economy.
What an extraordinary butcher cut of the times, with every bone removed! The meal which would benefit especially European politicians if for nothing than for the historical insights which they have forgotten or, worse, of which they are not even aware. The disillusioned observer's lens is commendable in every aspect, Prof. Milanović.
There's no common interest because there are very different views of the good life, across both cultural and subcultural levels.
It's unclear how much of that is actually caused by new media and other trends of this time, vs just being more in our collective face than it was before.
But either way, perhaps going somewhere where one's view is the majority on at many administrative levels as possible is the most reasonable thing to do in this context, for those who can afford it.
And it's clear that if there was a bit less to lose, there would be civil wars and coups all around the developed world by now.
Perhaps a better operational definition of democracy would be ”if a majority thinks the government would do something, it will”.
In that case it is obvious that we don’t have democracies anymore. As one of the commentators said, 75% want the fossile fuels to be phased out, but they aren’t. Another from my country: 80% want the profit motive out of healthcare, but it isn’t.
Internal inequality is rising in almost all countries and it is not that governments try to resist it, they help. Spanish economist Pablo Torija calculated that while in the 70s leftist OECD governments favoured most the 18th percentile, centrist governments favoured most the 50th percentile and rightist governments favored most the 82nd percentile, today they all favour most the 100th. See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2219853. And worse than that, they favour most the richest 0,2 %. Obviously, that is not what a majority wants, but it is what it gets.
Colin Crouch has coined the concept ”post-democracy”. It is not about military governments and fascist storm-troops, it is about not having the levers to make the governments submit to peoples’ priorities.
Crouch himself explain it with the waning power of the trade unions, which – at least in the industrial world – were the repositories of popular agendas. And they lost their power because of ”globalization”: production was outsourced and capitalists began earning money not by organizing production chains but by owning assets they rent out. They became rentiers. And in a rentier society there is no need for people as there is in industrial capitalism.
So people has no power.
American presidential elections actually make sense in terms of the collective results. If the incumbent president is unpopular, he or his party loses. If he is popular then he wins. If he is popular but is not running, then the party with the dispensation wins.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-my-analytical-approach-is-different-9b0#:~:text=Three%20factors%20seem,in%20light%20blue.
At present, the Reagan dispensation is still operative. Thus, if Trump is popular in 2028, his party wins, if not then Democrats win. If the Democrat who wins is popular in 2032, he gets a second term. If not Republicans win and it's the end of democracy. In 2036, if we still have a Republican dispensation (as seems likely) Republicans win and democracy ends then.
Now would be a good time to discuss how we are going to get a dispensation like FDR did to prevent this from happening.
Democracy is basically the ability to choose and inevitably people make the 'wrong' decisions and sometimes win. This is why democracies are inherently unstable compared to dictatorships or aristocracies, and as you say, it is why democracy can lead to the latter. So the 'double movement' can result in an FDR, a Lenin or a Hitler. Well if you want 'human agency' that's life, but I know which system we should strive for.
Do democracies automatically address people's concerns? No, which is why people are kicking off about the results of technocratic governance etc. But whilst democracies won't address people's concerns in and of themselves, they are invariably required to do so. The mistake is to think there is a magic bullet – there isn't – we've got to try to do stuff better. What constitutes 'better'? That is contingent, in other words you are in the realm of debate and morals, politics, political economy etc.
Why repeat the obviously false assertion that Western state are democracies because the elect there preselected leaders democratically when warrior bands have been doing exactly that for 40,000 years? Mongols famously lifted a siege in Europe in order to get home in time for one such election.
Not one warrior imagined that he lived in a democracy because he voted and nor should we because, as President Lincoln's Attorney General, Lincoln’s Secretary of State observed, “We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”.
Our Presidents hire and fire all senior officials, secretly ban fifty thousand citizens from flying, order people kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated and take the country to war. No Chinese leader, not even Mao at his peak, could do any of those things.
Though there is no consensus about what “democracy” means, to the extent that a definition is required, democracy is a political system where the political unit in question is run broadly as desired by the people who reside in it.
Comparing the constitutional, participative, elective, consultative, legislative, operational, substantive, and financial elements of big-state American and Chinese democracies, we can see the differences. In the Confucian tradition, geniuses have always led the nation by moral example, but beyond beneficial infrastructure, they produced few benefits for the rural majority.
Mao updated this tradition in 1945, when he envisioned "a free and democratic China in which all government levels, including the central government, are created by general and equal secret balloting and are responsible to the people who elected them. It will implement Dr. Sun Yat-sen's three principles of democracy, Lincoln's principle of 'of the people, by the people, for the people,' and Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter.