The Age of Discord: Fragmented politics and unhinged discourse

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 25^th anniversary of the Institute for Policy Dialogue. My panel was supposed to be on democracy and inequality. I somehow overlooked that it will be about democracy and spoke mostly about inequality. The other panelists were Winnie Byanyima from the United Nations (previously from Oxfam), Ravi Kanbur, economics professor at Cornell, and Binaifer Nowrojee, the head of Open Society Foundation. Peter Goodman, from the New York Times, moderated the discussion.

There was lot of emphasis, particularly from Winnie and Mrs. Nowrojee on democracy. All nice words were, as is common, used: participation, agency, transparency, justice, no corruption, low inequality and so forth. But the question is: are these words, when applied to today’s democracies, relevant and do they have much meaning anymore?

I would like to go through a short historical excursus. The most compact definition of democracy is by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: the struggle of political parties for the largest number of votes and thus for the right to rule. With that very narrow definition of democracy, we must acknowledge that the 1930s authoritarian regimes came to power observing it. NSDAP won the largest number of votes in the German Parliament in the last two elections in 1932 and was kept out of government precisely because it was believed that it would rule dictatorially once it came to power. Eventually large industrialists and large landowners decided to somehow fence Hitler in and Hindenburg gave him the mandate to form the government (see, for example, Henry Turner’s excellent Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power). They did so because the country was becoming entirely ungovernable not only in Parliament but in the streets. Similar autocratic and dictatorial regimes ruled practically all of Europe in the 1930s: Metaxas in Greece, King Alexander in Yugoslavia, Marshal Pilsudski and Colonel Beck in Poland, Admiral Horthy in Hungary, Schuschnigg in Austria, Mussolini in Italy, Smetona in Lithuania, General Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal. Mark Mazower describes the period very well in Dark Continent. “Dark” of course refers to Europe of the 1920s and the 1930s. What we notice is that all these leaders were popular, some very popular, and many came to power by democratic or semi-democratic means. Ian Kershaw in his two-volume biography of Hitler writes that Hitler in 1937 was surely the most popular head of state in Europe. His popularity increased after Anschluss, and even more so after he got most of Bohemia and united the Sudeten Germans who lived there.

Let us now move to the current situation. We see something similar: governments that ruling opinion-makers believe are bad do seem to do well in the polls. At this very moment the genocide in Gaza is being conducted by a fully democratically elected government of Israel. The invasion of Ukraine against all international norms is being led by Putin who won all the elections since 2000 and although there was certainly a significant amount of fraud nobody denies that even if the election were totally free he would win them. Erdoğan who is now trying to crack down on the opposition has nevertheless ruled Turkey for 22 years and won the elections whose outcomes were accepted by the opposition (except the last one where the opposition contested the validity of the vote). Other so-called undemocratic leaders like Orbán in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia and Vučić in Serbia might at some point lose elections but, so far, for more than a decade, they had won them all and they still enjoy significant or even majority popular support. In Serbia after almost a year of incessant protests that have brought together students and large segments of the civil society and ordinary people the opinion polls still give 45% of intention to vote to Vučić’s party while the second largest party gets only 6%. Modi has won three general elections since 2014. And let us not forget Trump who won 77 million votes under the condition where he was fighting an incumbent vice-president which is normally a huge advantage for the latter. One must ask a question: is there something wrong? Could it be that ordinary people like the parties that social scientists proclaim to be anti-democratic? Could it be that people use democracy to elect undemocratic parties and leaders?

What political scientists and some participants at the panel might reply is to say that democracy is not simply the right to vote. It includes all other things like non-discrimination, free judiciary system, independent media, separation of powers etc. Indeed, the vote is not the only or full definition of democracy but it’s certainly one of the primary, perhaps even the primary, ways in which democracy functions and effectively leads to the formation of governments that enjoy support of majority or plurality of the people. But not only do people vote for “wrong” parties, they seem not to care very much for voting at all. Almost 40% of Americans eligible to vote did not bother to participate in the last election. It is hard to imagine where one had to live in the United States, perhaps alone in a desert, like early Christians living in the Egyptian deserts, not to have heard of Trump, elections, Democrats, and how important the election is. “Normal” elections in the United States have the turnout of only about 50%. It means that one out of each two people with the right to vote is indifferent as to who might rule him or her.

Those two phenomena: on one hand, people uninterested in democracy, and, on the other hand, among those who do vote a significant percentage, and in many cases a majority, voting for what scientists argue are wrong parties makes one wonder that perhaps only one-fourth of the electorate shares political scientists’ preferences. Perhaps political scientists should move to study a different field. When they try to figure out why people vote for wrong parties many correlations or even causal mechanisms have been proposed: social status, income level, minority status, rural areas, education, race, gender and so forth. This is then often used as a weapon to chastise those who vote wrongly by questioning their intelligence and education or their morals. There is in the background perhaps an effort to disenfranchise those who vote for the wrong parties or to somehow make their votes less valuable (such proposals have John Stuart Mill in their pedigree). Stubbornness, lack of information, moral turpitude were linked to the voters who voted wrongly.

We need to reassess 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. This gap has produced many other negative effects. Those who believe that people tend to vote wrongly disparage them by calling them malcontents, envious, deplorables or fascists. The other side accuses in return various elites to be supercilious and estranged (precisely thanks to their education and wealth) from what normal folks really want. Both accusations have some truth. The difference in opinions and polarization is such that insults are quasi permanently exchanged. The tone of the political discourse has reached a hysterical pitch. American politics had always had certain hysterical aspect, when an objective had to be reached (say, the decision to attack Iraq), but the current level of hysterical discourse does not abate with time and increasingly spreads to all areas, including culture, leisure, even food preferences. We can observe similar effects in other countries, when particularly divisive topics like immigration or current wars in Ukraine and Palestine are discussed.

It is almost inevitable that stronger statements whose main objective is to mock, impugn, or ridicule an opponent are followed by equally harsh accusations from the other side. As the tone has risen and all arguments seem fair to use, we have all become somewhat unhinged in our debates. This is inevitable with this level of polarization when each side attacks with all available means. It is unclear where this could ultimately lead as there are no obvious ways—now—how to bridge the gap or to behave as if it did not exist.

Let me end where I began: with today’s conference. Those who attack majorities that vote wrongly seem to speak, when it comes to international organizations, in tongues that come from an entirely different era. They call for international solidarity, inter-country cooperation etc. at the time when the world is being divided Into political, economic and military blocs. It is a fantasy that under the current conditions which are likely to prevail for at least several decades there will be anything but the very minimal ability to do things internationally whether it be fighting climate change, epidemics, or coordinating monetary policies, rescheduling of debts, trade rules. All of it basically has to go out of the agenda and would be dealt with either bilaterally or from position of force by whoever is in that position. So the presumption that there is some general interest shared by all citizens of the world is entirely inapplicable in today’s times. When one hears some such speakers, one feels that they have been stuck in the 1990s (when such illusions could at least have been entertained) and to not have observed that the world has since changed.

On the other hand, the speakers who show the fragmentation of the world the way it is, and try to explain that fragmentation, support responsible multipolarity, and raise the issues like the one that “good” governments are often unable to get elected due to people’s lack of support appear to argue for moral relativism where the type of government does not matter and international cooperation can be done piecemeal, on the issues on which only some countries agree. The two sides speak past each other: one speaks about things which existed in the past and no longer exist today, and the other tries to speak of the things that exist today but is accused of glorifying the present and of lacking aspiration or vision for the betterment of humankind. This leads both sides to produce unhinged, one-sided, and in some cases borderline crazy arguments.