“There’s something dangerous happening in America now,” said Biden. “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy. I don’t think anyone today doubts democracy is at stake in 2024.”

If we’ve learned anything in the last seven years, it’s that democracy can’t be taken for granted. A 2021 report, Democracy Under Siege, listed the United States among twenty-five countries that have experienced a massive deterioration in freedoms fuelled by political corruption, conflicts of interest and lack of government transparency. The report describes the final weeks of the Trump presidency — as the incumbent strove to illegally overturn his election loss — as an illustration of the parlous state of American democracy.

New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has identified twin threats facing the nation’s democratic status. The first (acute) threat is the growing movement inside the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat in an election. In 2022, more than 300 Republican candidates for state and national offices either denied or questioned the outcome of the presidential election. This, says the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, is unprecedented in American history and seemingly unique in the history of mature democracies around the world.

The second (chronic) threat is that the power to set government policy is increasingly disconnected from public opinion. Just a few examples highlight the trend. The US Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees, seems poised to shape American politics for many years with decisions on issues like abortion and gun rights that don’t reflect the views of anywhere near a majority of the population. Polls routinely show most Americans are alarmed or concerned about climate change, but its causes and impacts are denied by Republican lawmakers. A supermajority of Americans support voting rights with equal access for all eligible adults, but many states are working to limit voting access and some Republicans, led by Trump, have admitted that expanding voting hurts their party’s election prospects.

Other, equally disturbing, threats exist: the rise of political violence and intimidation; the erosion of rights for LGBTQI+ people, asylum seekers and other minority groups; book bans and political intrusions into educational institutions and curricula; increasing division along racial, religious, socioeconomic and political lines. It’s easy to see the long reach of Trump and Trumpism in every one of these threats.

Most recently, Congress was brought to a halt for three weeks because House Republicans caved in to MAGA extremists. They threw out House speaker Kevin McCarthy but then couldn’t agree on who should replace him. Trump’s social media criticisms of successive nominees and his loyalty tests carried more sway with House Republicans than a new speaker’s ability to oversee the House’s work.

Representative Mike Johnson from Louisiana was finally elected speaker after three others had been nominated but then withdrawn. Known as MAGA Mike and active in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he is a self-described evangelical Christian who is staunchly anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQI+ rights, anti-union and anti-immigration. He has embraced the far right’s culture wars and backed the House Republicans’ inquiry aimed at impeaching Biden.

Elected to Congress just seven years ago and having never held a committee chair, Johnson is the least-experienced speaker in more than a century. Senate Republicans openly admitted they didn’t know who he was. But experience and expertise are scorned and devalued by Trump and his cohort. As the Nation’s John Nichols wrote, Mike Johnson’s main qualification for the job was that he’s neither a Democrat nor a democrat.

In fact, Johnson has insisted the United States isn’t a democracy — a system he defines as “two wolves and a lamb deciding what is for dinner” — but rather a constitutional republic based by its founders on a “biblical admonition.” He shares this view with a number of his lawmaker colleagues who are eager to stress the republic’s restraints on democracy. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” posted Utah Senator Mike Lee in 2020. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

Johnson’s role in attempting to overturn the 2020 elections and his position as speaker, which places him second in line to the presidency behind the vice-president, has raised concerns about how he might seek to influence the outcome of the next presidential election (assuming he is still in that position in January 2025) should Trump (almost certain to be the Republican candidate) lose again. No wonder Trump is happy to claim credit for his election to the speakership.

Much has been written about the extent of Trump’s influence over the Republican Party. (Perhaps takeover is a better description.) That he played such a pivotal role in determining who was finally elected as speaker and was endorsing candidates for upcoming primaries even while campaigning on his own behalf and attending to his legal troubles explains why he is courted, feared and rarely out of the news.

Merging his campaigning with his courthouse appearances seems to be working. Legal woes that would distract or destroy most candidates are now marketed as a feature of his 2024 presidential run. So too is his ostentatious disrespect for legal processes and precedents. He has been castigated by several judges and fined twice for verbal attacks on courthouse staff. Judge Arthur Engoron even threatened to lock him up. “Why should there not be severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disobeyal [sic] of a clear court order?” he asked.

Trump’s brand of authoritarianism, demagoguery and populism has deep roots in American history, but his spin on the tradition is amplified by his wily command of the media and fears among a segment of voters (primarily white, religious and without a college education) who see themselves and their values left behind in a racially and ethnically diverse economy and nation. Trump plays off what they see as an existential threat to their way of life.

In the aftermath of the 2022 elections, when the Republicans’ lacklustre performance could be read as a repudiation of Trump, the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb argued — correctly — that Trump is not solely responsible for the current levels of intolerance, racism, nativism, belligerence and anti-democratic behaviour in the Republican Party, and there is no reason to believe his absence would cause these to evaporate.

Presidential candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy might be lagging forty or more points behind Trump in the polls, but they are promulgating the same ideology and are keen to be seen as equally fierce cultural warriors. Those Republican candidates who aren’t toeing the Trump line — namely Nikki Haley and Chris Christie — are lagging even further behind.

Republican states, meanwhile, have mounted a frightening series of anti-democratic efforts. They are manipulating election administration by controlling secretaries of state and other executive offices. They are giving partisan state legislatures greater control over elections. They are reducing ballot drop box access for early voting. Several states, among them North Carolina and Louisiana, have resisted court decisions based on the Voting Rights Act that aim to make congressional district maps more accurately reflect the makeup of their population.

There is no such loss of the right to own guns. Nationally, thirty-five mass gun killings — incidents in which four or more people died, not including the perpetrator/s — have been recorded so far this year. More and more people are using guns to harass and intimidate others, including lawmakers, elected officials, school board members, voters and election workers. Although a significant majority of Americans support universal background checks, an assault-weapons ban and other priorities of gun-control advocates, stronger state and federal controls are elusive.

Links can be made between gun violence, democracy and trust. Research shows how eroded democratic institutions and declining trust in social structures lead to more lethal violence and increases in gun ownership. The Pew Research Center has shown that many Americans think the public’s trust in the federal government and in their fellow citizens has declined and that the interplay between the lack of trust in the public and the interpersonal spheres has made it harder to solve some of the country’s problems.

The latest Pew polling figures put trust in the federal government at almost its lowest in nearly seven decades of polling. Just 1 per cent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” and only 15 per cent trust the government “most of the time.” Writing in Politico, Max Stier and Tom Freedman argue that this statistic is more concerning than the rise of anti-democratic movements or efforts to steal an election: it reflects very poorly on the nation’s primary democratic institution, Congress, and its ability to deal with social, economic and foreign policy challenges.

Reviving American democracy means reversing the decline in political rights and civil liberties, improving public discourse, and reforming political institutions and practices to persuade Americans that politicians are representing them fairly and governments are working to solve pressing problems. Key among the essential reforms is a remaking of the Republican Party — or at least a rejection of its Trump-cult elements. That brand of right-wing populism may not be the only threat to democracy in the United States, but it is the biggest. •

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Its population was ethnically mixed but with a strong dominance of Ukrainians, who made up 73 per cent of the people. Russians constituted a significant minority of 22 per cent, followed by people identifying as Jews, Belarusians and Moldavians, all making up just under one in a hundred. Other nationalities of the Soviet empire, from Bulgarians and Poles to Azeri, Koreans, Germans, Kyrgyz and Lithuanians, made up the remaining 3 per cent.

Regional differences in political outlook were strong. Although all regions voted in favour of separating from the Soviet Union in the December 1991 referendum, some were more enthusiastic than others. In Lviv, in the west of the country, 95 per cent of the people voted and 97 per cent of them approved the declaration of independence, which had been made in late August in response to the coup attempt in Moscow. In Crimea, an ethnically strongly Russian region at the other extreme, only 68 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, with 54 per cent of them voting in favour.

Donetsk, an industrial region in the east of the country with strong economic ties to Russia, stood somewhat between these extremes. There, 77 per cent registered their vote and 84 per cent of those people voted for independence.

With the partial exception of the three Baltic republics, all post-Soviet nations have struggled with three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an economic crisis and corruption. Outside the three Baltic outliers (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the relatively well-performing Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all resource-exporting economies. Everybody else is struggling.

In terms of wealth per person (measured by GDP per capita), Russia is about at the level of China (US$10,500), while even the rich Baltic countries are nowhere near the United States (US$63,500) or Australia (US$51,800).

The comparative poverty of the region is partly a legacy of the Soviet economy’s poor performance, and partly a hangover from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. In Ukraine, agriculture continued to be run by the disastrously unproductive collective and state farms until 2000. Other economic reforms were also slow in coming.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of the integrated Soviet imperial economy, the economic burden of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, ageing and inefficient equipment, and dependence on Russian oil and gas were problematic legacies.

Moreover, Ukraine’s state apparatus had controlled no more than 5 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP before 1990 (the rest was under the direct control of Moscow). Officials thus “lacked the experience necessary to take quick and effective control” of the economy, as the writer Marco Bojcun puts it. The quick expansion of the share of the economy controlled by Ukraine’s officials — reaching 40 per cent on the eve of independence — only added to the problems.

Together, these issues combined to create a disaster: between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine’s economy contracted every year by at least 10 per cent and as much as 23 per cent. Overall, it had contracted to 43 per cent of its 1990 level by 1996 — a decline worse than the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The main reason nobody starved after 1991 was similar to Russia’s: the existence of private gardening, a legacy of the Soviet period. “The overwhelming majority of workers have out of town kitchen gardens,” wrote a worker from the Dnipro region in 1996. These were “little patches of land given them by the factory management under an agreement with the agricultural authorities… People work five days in the factories and two days on their plots.” According to official statistics, by 1996 some 80–95 per cent of fruit, vegetables and potatoes came from such plots. Even a quarter of all livestock were raised in private gardens.

Ukraine’s economy has not recovered nearly as much as that of resource-rich Russia, and its economic growth has stagnated since 2009. Russia’s war by proxy in Donbas since 2014 again stunted economic growth: between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine’s GDP halved.

The current war will have catastrophic consequences for this overall picture. In early 2022, the World Bank predicted a contraction of the economy by 45 per cent. In the same year, 47 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians reported that they did not have “enough money even for food” or had money sufficient “only for the most basic items.”

Post-Soviet countries are not only poor, they are also among the world’s most corrupt. Among European countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are all known as deeply corrupt societies. Of the 336 politicians whose secret offshore financial accounts were leaked in the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, thirty-eight came from Ukraine, among them president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was the largest number of any country in the world. Russia’s figure was nineteen.

Over time, however, Ukraine has improved its record. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a higher score means less corruption. Ukraine initially improved significantly after 2004. While this progress was undone after a few years, improvement has been steady since 2009. Meanwhile, Russia has stagnated since 2012 and is classified today as more corrupt than its neighbour.

Corruption and economic crisis do little to embed democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the societies that succeeded the Soviet Union are ruled by authoritarian regimes. (Nine out of fifteen of them, or 60 per cent, according to the 2021 classification by Freedom House, an organisation that measures democratic performance.) Only the three Baltic states, which are members of both NATO and the European Union, are classified as consolidated democracies. Three others, Ukraine among them, are hybrid regimes, where authoritarian elements compete with democratic ones.

Within this general context, Ukraine is doing relatively well. Between 2017 and 2022 it was classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, its score oscillating between 60 and 62 on a scale out of 100, where the higher number indicates a higher level of civic and political liberty. Such numbers do not indicate that Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, however, either in the region (where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stand out as the freest countries, with scores of between 89 and 90) or around the world (the troubled United States scored 83 in 2021, while Australia stood at 97).

But Ukraine contrasts positively with Russia, which has been categorised as “not free” with a score of 20, falling to 19 in 2022. And Vladimir Putin’s state, in turn, still compares favourably with other dictatorships in the region, which are even more repressive: Belarus with 11 and Tajikistan with 8. For comparison, China scored 9 in 2021 and North Korea 3.

To a significant extent, the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space is a Soviet legacy. “In all parts of the former Soviet empire,” write two legal scholars who studied this problem in detail, “the socialist party-state structure left a shared legacy of an executive-dominated state.” Change depended on whether a postcolonial or neocolonial mindset won the day.

In other words: did people want to stay in the Russian orbit or not? If not, the obvious choice was an orientation towards Europe, which came with mixed constitutions stressing checks and balances, weakening the executive; if yes, the constitution would be modelled much more closely on Russia’s “crown presidentialism,” further entrenching the centrality of the executive. In Ukraine, the former tendency won out, but not without political struggles.

One rather basic aspect of democracy is that governments are changed peacefully by elections. Ukraine is doing quite well in this regard, particularly if compared with its two autocratic neighbours. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; in Russia, Putin since 1999. Ukraine, meanwhile, has seen seven presidencies since 1991: of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14), Oleksandr Turchynov (2014), Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) and now Volodymyr Zelenskyy (since 2019).

The majority of these presidents were elected to office and left when they lost elections or decided not to contest them. Two were removed through revolutions, one peaceful (the Orange Revolution of 2004–05), one violent (the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan, of 2013–14). But both revolutions resulted in elected governments again, not the imposition of revolutionary dictatorships.

Ukraine’s presidents ruled in competition with parliament, at first the one elected under Soviet conditions in 1990, then, since 1994, a post-Soviet one. This competition was formalised in the 1996 constitution, which put the directly elected president next to a one-chamber parliament that limited presidential powers to a much larger extent than in Russia.

Its unusually strong parliament became an issue because of the fragmented party system, however. First, there were too many parties; second, the existing parties were not based around major ideological positions or clearly elaborated political philosophies; third, there were many socially influential groups competing for power. As one observer puts it, this system was based “not on ideological factors, but on the competition of financial and industrial groups and regional elites” interested “in dispersing power in order to control at least a small segment of it.” The result was “political instability.”

Ukraine’s political system, then, constituted something of a unique case, both within the post-Soviet space and in the world at large. Its huge number of parties — more than 120 were officially registered in 2002 — were often internally divided as well. In the words of one observer, this fragmentation was “unprecedented for a modern democratic republic.” For another, it “hindered democratisation” by making it “difficult for the population to orient itself politically.” But the diversity also made it more difficult for would-be autocrats and their networks of clients to consolidate power.

The same can be said for the much-quoted regional fragmentation of Ukraine. On the one hand, regionalism has defined voting behaviour and hence fragmented the political system. In both parliamentary and presidential elections until 2019, voters in the more Russian and Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea voted for one set of parties, while those in the more Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine preferred a different set. “No party managed to elect candidates across Ukraine,” writes political scientist Paul D’Anieri. Presidential elections show a similar regional pattern.

At their extreme, regional divisions can define conflict lines within Ukraine, including the threat of secessionism and ethno-political conflict. On the other hand, regional identities and political networks also help balance power within the broader political system and prevent any one group of elites from monopolising power. Ukraine’s regional, cultural, religious and economic diversity can be seen as an asset as much as a liability. For historian Serhii Plokhy, it is “one of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy.”

Of the three main regional power groups, one is based in Kharkiv in the northeast; the second in the industrial heartland around Donetsk in the east; and the third in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the heart of the Soviet Union’s defence and space industries. These were already part of the political structure of late Soviet times, and they led to a specific form of “patronal democracy” in which clans competed for political power within a republican set-up.

At the same time, winners often tried to replace this competitive structure with a single hierarchy of power. The first attempt came under Leonid Kuchma, who built a “patronal autocracy,” but the Orange Revolution of 2004 destroyed this system and reverted to dual competition between president and parliament on the one hand and multiple power networks on the other.

Yanukovych then tried again, and successfully neutralised competing clans — until ordinary citizens intervened to stop this usurpation of power. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity not only undid Yanukovych’s dictatorial slide but also led to an election labelled by two experts as “probably the fairest one in the country’s history.” This transformation of the political system was one-sided, however: while it did constitute a redemocratisation, it didn’t eliminate regional and patronal politics.

It was only with Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 that things began to change in this regard. Zelenskyy was “no chief patron and [had] no patronal pyramid” but instead gathered strong support from the new middle and creative classes, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. He mostly spoke Russian during his campaign, which helped overcome regional differences between Russian speakers in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west. He achieved what many thought impossible: his election was the first in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where voting did not follow regional patterns. •

This is an edited extract from Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story, published this month by Melbourne University Press.

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The symbolism lay in the fact that 27 June is the anniversary of the day in 1932 when Thailand promulgated its first-ever constitution. By gesturing towards that milestone, almost as much as in any of its policies, Move Forward demonstrated why it is on a collision course with Thailand’s two most powerful conservative institutions, the military and the monarchy.

The new party is on a mission to reclaim the legacy and promise of the 1932 revolution, which formally ended Thailand’s absolute monarchy but merely marked the beginning of a long struggle between progressives and an alliance of royalists and military officers. That struggle has seen thirteen coups, twenty constitutions, and rule by the military or its proxy parties for seven out of every ten years since 1932.

Move Forward’s quest to end that cycle — in the same way South Korean and Indonesian reformers ended their periods of authoritarian rule — will mean redefining the meaning of “constitutional monarchy” to ensure that the monarchy truly is above politics and below the law, in the same way that constitutional monarchies are in Japan and England. If the party is successful, it will settle a fundamental question unresolved in Thailand to this day: where does sovereignty lie, with the people or the monarchy?

Move Forward’s extraordinary support — a doubling of its vote compared with the 2019 election, when it arrived on the scene as the Future Forward party — indicates its project is increasingly resonating with many ordinary Thais, and especially young people. They wish their country to be “normal,” well governed and prosperous, and their leaders to be modern and accountable, perhaps in the manner of wildly popular Bangkok governor Chadchart Sittipunt, a hardworking politician who has set precedents in transparent and efficient governance.

Since the ascent of Rama X and the rule of military dictator General Prayuth Chan-ocha, Thailand has headed in precisely the opposite direction. Following Prayuth’s 2014 coup and Vajiralongkorn’s 2016 ascent to the throne, signs of absolutist monarchical rule and a wish to erase memory of the 1932 revolution have proliferated. Even the historic plaque commemorating the 1932 revolution disappeared, replaced by another that proclaimed: “Loyalty and love for the Triple Gem [Buddha, Dharma and Sangha], one’s clan and having an honest heart for one’s king is good. These are the tools to make one’s state prosper!”

The new monarch appointed, dismissed and then reappointed a royal consort (the first since the era of Rama V, 1868–1910), seized control of the monarchy’s financing organisation, the powerful Crown Property Bureau, and set about establishing a private army with two personally controlled regiments. Future Forward, which boldly opposed the last of these in 2019, was marked as a potential hotbed of lom chao (those who would overthrow the monarchy) and dissolved by a Thai Constitutional Court in the same year.

Prayuth, for his part, rammed through a new constitution with minimal public debate or consultation. To increase the scope for conservatives to dictate the country’s direction without resorting to coups, it gave 250 junta-appointed senators an equal say in appointing the prime minister, harking back to the “half-baked democracy” of the 1980s when Thai military officers retained seats in parliament. Prayuth refused to swear allegiance even to this illiberal constitution following the 2019 election, reserving his pledge of loyalty for the monarch.

The illiberal constitution and its appointed Senate worked exactly as intended after the election in May this year. Although Move Forward’s leader, young former businessperson Pita Limjaroenrat, assembled a 312-seat coalition — a clear majority of the House of Representatives — his nomination for the prime ministership was denied on 13 July. Senators were able to block Pita simply by abstaining from voting, depriving him of the votes he needed for his coalition of 312 to reach 376, a simple majority of both houses. In the end, a paltry thirteen senators ventured to support him.

The joint sitting was Thai politics in microcosm, showing vividly the divide between those who speak for average Thais and those who place the monarchy above all. On one side was a coalition representing more than twenty-five million voters (out of thirty-eight million) in the party-list count and more than twenty million (also out of thirty-eight million) in the constituency seat count. On the other side stood a group primarily representing the former junta, the military, the monarchy and the business oligarchs who have benefited from the absence of transparency and accountability of a junta-led regime.

The chasm was apparent in the statements made by Pita and his foes. Pita offered a vision based on his party’s campaign promises, with plans to break up the monopolies that stifle the Thai economy, undertake educational reform to end archaic practices like rote learning, and institute political reform to devolve more power to the regions and security reform to look afresh at the bloody two-decade-long conflict in Thailand’s south.

The senators, along with the parties aligned with the military, offered but one reason for their opposition to Pita: his party’s pledge to reform the notoriously draconian and illiberal section of the Thai criminal code law known as section 112. Intended to prohibit lèse-majesté — insults to the monarchy — the section has been used to imprison minors and other Thais “liking” the wrong post on Facebook. Anyone can make a section 112 allegation, trials are held in secret and penalties go as high as fifteen years’ jail. The provision has been used to silence political debate on the monarchy’s role in Thai politics, including its validating of Thailand’s coup-makers.

The joint sitting saw the pro-monarchist minority parties launch a ferocious and at times wildly hyperbolic attack on Move Forward’s claim to the country’s leadership. If section 112 was reformed, one Bhumjaithai party MP ranted, he would introduce a new law allowing people to shoot those who insult the monarchy.

Most of the Senate, in contrast, were coolly indifferent. Some forty-three senators didn’t even attend the session. All of Thailand’s military commanders, granted Senate positions in the 2017 constitution, were indisposed; many Thais wish they would exhibit the same indifference to politics when enjoined to conduct coups.

Of the thirteen senators who crossed the floor to support Pita, none were from the three armed services, despite many retired soldiers making up the Senate. Indoctrinated throughout their military education with the belief that monarchy is sacred, inviolable and indispensable to their country’s security, they are implacably opposed to any notion of monarchical reform, no matter how moderate. If the democratic coalition achieves government, reform of military education will surely be a priority.

In response, speakers from the democracy coalition sought to allay concerns about the section 112 reform proposal. Some pointed out that the section had been amended many times; others noted that the policy belonged only to the Move Forward Party and was not included in the agreement between the eight parties making up the coalition. Their arguments fell on deaf ears, as did Pita’s final plea to the senators, “May your decision reflect the hopes of the people, not of your own fears.”

With characteristic pragmatism and resilience, Move Forward then set out a new roadmap. It would appeal to the Senate once more in a repeat session on Wednesday 19 July and thereafter seek an amendment to section 272 of the constitution, which gives senators a role in selecting the prime minister. If this fails, as it is likely to, they will then move aside to allow the party with the second-greatest number of seats, Pheu Thai, to nominate one of its candidates for the prime minister. [In the event, Pita was suspended from parliament by the constitutional court on 19 July pending a judgement on his alleged holding of shares in a media company, in violation of election law.]

Will Pheu Thai’s nominee gain Senate support? It will be irony indeed if senators endorse the party torn down by coups in 2006 and 2014.

What does seem certain is that the conservative parties, including Prayuth’s United Thai Nation Party and his former deputy and military comrade Prawit Wongsuwan’s Phalang Pracharat, won’t attempt to form a minority government with Senate backing. Prayuth has declared an intention to retire from politics, and such a government would be only theoretically possible, even with Senate support. It could not pass laws or survive a no-confidence vote unless it could quickly pull members across from the democratic coalition, a prospect that seems unlikely.

Many twists and turns remain on the road to a new Thai government. If the constitutional court were to rule that Pita’s alleged shareholding disqualifies all Moving Forward members, a government more palatable to the monarchy and military could yet return. In an era of sophisticated authoritarianism, regimes have many ways of cloaking their authoritarian impulses beneath the trappings of democratic process, with the courts a favoured method of disabling political opponents.

In the meantime, Move Forward won’t retreat from its goal of revitalising the vision of the 1932 revolutionaries against the seeming tide of absolutism. On the eve of the Senate vote, one of its leading figures, MP Rangsiman Rome, advocated that Thailand’s national day should revert to 24 June, the date of the 1932 revolution. While some decried this as inflammatory and tactically wrong-headed, Move Forward knows that younger voters are far less reverent of the monarchy and want their country to modernise. With each election bringing in roughly four million young voters, can Thailand’s conservative elites continue to resist this change?

As the biggest economy in mainland Southeast Asia, Thailand exerts significant influence. All its neighbours are authoritarian regimes well practised in denying their people a real say in governing their countries. Will Thailand continue, along with China, to be an authoritarian centre of gravity, legitimising dictators and sharing authoritarian tools and techniques? Or can it represent something more hopeful? •

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In his provocative new book, Russia Against Modernity, Alexander Etkind argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a single, broad historical pattern. It is the last gasp of a failing, kleptocratic petrostate for which external aggression is a natural move. Rather than the Ukraine war itself, Etkind is interested in the conditions within Russia that have culminated so calamitously.

In what is more a pamphlet than a treatise, Etkind combines brevity and playfulness with a degree of erudition that other works covering the Russia–Ukraine conflict seldom manage, melding political economy, history, demography, social theory and social psychology. That range reflects Etkind’s eclectic polymathy: a native of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), he grew up in the Soviet Union, completed two degrees in psychology at Leningrad State University before earning a PhD in Slavonic cultural history in Helsinki, and has variously taught and researched — in faculties of sociology, political science, languages, history and international relations — in St Petersburg, New York, Cambridge, Florence and Vienna.

This smorgasbord of disciplines is reflected in his previous books: an analysis of Russia’s practice of imperialism and internal colonisation; a history of psychoanalysis in Russia; memory studies of the Soviet gulag and the second world war; and Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources. The latter, which foreshadows a central theme of Russia Against Modernity, argues that the drive to accumulate resources has long had a corrosive effect on societies, and on the planet.

Etkind’s big-picture approach means this is not a book to read for a detailed narrative or analysis of the events that led up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022. Nor will you find much discussion of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, NATO, Russia–Ukraine relations or Ukrainian history, or of the course of the war itself.

Most explanations of the Ukraine war tend to give primacy to either external or internal factors. The “externalists,” for want of a better word, include those who claim the war is a natural outcome of unwise/reckless NATO expansion. Going further, some even buy the Kremlin line — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the West’s fundamental, if unstated, goal is to weaken or destroy Russia.

At the other end of the externalist spectrum are those, including many Ukrainians and East Europeans, who believe an inherent imperialism is demonstrated by Russia’s aggression towards former territories. Some attribute this to the size of the country, its innate political culture, the “Russian psyche” or, in its crudest renderings, a kind of Russian DNA.

“Internalists” emphasise the domestic drivers of the war — notably an authoritarian state’s need to legitimise itself through nationalist and revanchist propaganda. In this view, the Ukraine war and other militaristic posturing or adventures are cynically deployed to further the interests of the elite. For some, Ukraine presented a threat to the Kremlin because it offered a democratic alternative. A handful on the left claim that the war’s roots lie in the ambitions of Russian oligarchs vying to capture Ukraine’s valuable natural and other resources.

Some analysts, of course, combine or reconcile internal and external elements in explaining the war, but Etkind is rare in drawing together multiple threads and focusing on general trends. It isn’t always clear whether he wants us to take the picture he presents as Constable-like realism, an Impressionist canvas or even a satirical cartoon. In parts, the book feels like a Dali-style exploration of deeper, unconscious truths, leaving the reader feeling that Etkind is getting at something without being clear quite what.

Etkind’s main idea is that the Russian state and society is an exemplar of “paleomodernity,” following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in championing “grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature.” For Etkind, Putin’s war is not only a “special operation” against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture; it is also “a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.”

If paleomodernity — a conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder — reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, then its twenty-first-century antithesis is “gaiamodernity,” a higher form of civilisation where small, sustainable, democratic and feminine are beautiful, and racial, sexual and intellectual diversity are cherished. Etkind seems to see this nightmarish scenario for Tucker Carlson or Sky After Dark’s pundits as both a utopia to be dreamed of and a kind of immanent social order, destined to emerge, echoing Hegel’s and Marx’s systems of thought.

Etkind’s key take is that the “oiligarchs” and bureaucrats running Russia saw this “advance of history” as an existential threat to its oil and gas exports, which make up a third of Russia’s GDP, two-thirds of its exports and half the state budget. The money was crucial to the stability of Russia’s currency, crucial for its military spending and crucial for maintaining the elite’s luxurious lifestyle. It was also the chief driver of corruption, inequality and declining social and demographic indicators. All of this fed popular disillusionment, growing authoritarianism and elite paranoia and the ideologies supporting aggression.

As an archetypal petrostate, Etkind argues, Russia is afflicted by the resource curse, whereby an economy as a whole underperforms because a single commodity is so dominant. Initially, in the 2000s, rising oil prices underpinned Putin’s success in restoring economic growth. The populace gained a welcome sense of stability after the economic and political turmoil of the “wild nineties,” leading many to accept the gradual erosion of civil liberties.

By the 2010s, however, not only were Russian incomes falling but so were a range of social and economic metrics. By 2021, life expectancy had fallen to 105th globally, per-capita health spending to 104th and education spending to 125th. Russia had the fourth-highest carbon emissions globally and among the highest rates of suicides, abortions, road deaths and industrial accidents.

Thanks largely to embezzlement, post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality ever recorded. Its income inequality was among the world’s highest and by 2021 it led all major countries in inequality of wealth: 58 per cent of national wealth belonging to the top 1 per cent, well above Brazil (49 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). More than a fifth of Russia’s citizens, meanwhile, lived on less than US$10 a day, and the middle class had been hollowed out.

In excess of three trillion dollars had been stolen and squirrelled away abroad — more than the total financial assets legally owned by Russian households. “Economists from Harvard and Moscow alike believed that economic growth would be the source of all good in Russia, that accumulated wealth would trickle down to the poor, that the rising tide would lift all boats,” writes Etkind. “In fact, it lifted only the yachts of the rich. The boats of the poor leaked, and they drowned in the tide.”

The wealth gained from being the world’s biggest exporter of energy funded an enormous state machine, particularly a military, security and law-enforcement apparatus accounting for fully one-third of the budget. Russian military spending increased by a factor of seven between 2000 and 2020, compared with a factor of two in Germany and 2.5 in the United States. In the end, though, corruption has hobbled the Russian war effort in Ukraine and sanctions have stranded assets held abroad, including the mind-boggling superyachts of Putin, his top officials and Russia’s tycoons.

Etkind doesn’t really explain why the military–security sector became so bloated, beyond its being a very big trough for corrupt snouts. Most observers would point to Putin’s own reliance on and favouritism towards cronies from the sector — the so-called siloviki, or people of force — on top of his belief in restoring Russian greatness and the need for a strong repressive apparatus to quash dissent.

Etkind treats war as more or less a natural outcome of Russia’s political economy. The more a “parasitic state” relies on natural resources, the less it invests in human capital. The lower the human capital, the greater the state’s dependence on resource extraction. It accumulates gold, limits internal consumption, pursues domestic oppression and, sooner or later, launches a war of aggression. Yet this is only part of the picture, and doesn’t hold true for Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Qatar or other petrostates.

Some of Etkind’s most interesting, albeit speculative, chapters deal with the interplay between Russia’s political economy, its demographic decline and issues like gender inequality and homophobia. The latter have become a common theme of state-sponsored propaganda: TV pundits talk about fighting a degenerate West where genders proliferate; patriarchs and priests equate the war on Ukraine with fighting those Satanic “gay parades.”

Partly because of very high divorce rates, children are raised by only one parent, usually the mother, in one in three Russian families. Etkind pushes the envelope when he posits the growth of “fatherlessness” as a cause of authoritarian tendencies, as some postwar German theorists did in the case of Nazi Germany. High rates of domestic violence — which was actually decriminalised in 2017 in a nod to patriarchal opinion — have been another symptom of social dysfunction.

Etkind also highlights “granny power” as another bulwark against modernity: the heightened role of babushki (grandmothers) in many three-generation households, he says, imbues children with backward-looking and authoritarian ideas and attitudes. The three-generation household, with overburdened mothers and absent fathers, is a product of the inadequate incomes, housing, childcare and pensions generated by the parasitic petrostate, as well as men’s much lower life expectancy (sixty-five years, compared with women’s seventy-seven).

Etkind points to other elements of Russia’s demographic catastrophe — world-leading abortion rates, high rates of emigration among the young and educated — as signs of lack of trust and faith in a future governed by a corrupt and authoritarian state. “The birth rate,” he writes, “was the ultimate manifestation of public opinion.” A lot of these demographic problems were also present in the Soviet years, serving as a kind of canary in the mine presaging the Soviet Union’s decline.

Perhaps more telling, and more of a blow to male egos among the Russian elite, is Etkind’s suggestion that the homophobia prevalent in officially sponsored propaganda stems from the practice of bullying (dedovshchina, or the grandfather rule), often involving rape, in the military. And these super-wealthy grandfathers in the Kremlin, who Etkind notes are a generation older than Zelensky’s leadership circle in Ukraine, are natural allies of the impoverished grandmothers of the Russian suburbs, sharing the inherent conservatism of the three-generation family.

Etkind coins the term “stopmodernism” to describe Russia’s “special operation” against gaiamodernity. The war in Ukraine is just one weapon in its arsenal, alongside climate denial, election interference and others. Decarbonisation represents a huge challenge to Russia’s interests, and although Putin’s regime has played along at times with moves towards curbing emissions, it has also played a spoiler role. The biggest “gaiamodern” threat to the wealth of Russia’s elite have been the moves towards zero emissions by the European Union, its chief market for gas and oil, including the Transborder Carbon Tax announced in 2021.

Etkind also suggests that the 2009 Climategate hacks of emails, which purported to show climate change to be a conspiracy among scientists, was of a piece with Russia’s more recent hacking and online-disinformation efforts (including via Prigozhin’s infamous troll factories) to support right-wing politicians in the United States and Europe.

Etkind’s brushwork becomes a bit Dali-like in drawing lines between the petrostate’s political economy and motivations for the war, yet he makes some plausible points. He argues that rampant inequality led the elite to create fables to explain its privileged position and place blame elsewhere. He says that the kind of mystical nationalism encountered more and more frequently among the elite, including Putin, is a reworking of the idea of a chosen people to explain the fateful chance that endows some countries with an abundance of natural wealth.

The idea that Russia has a special, even divine, historical role is far from new — it featured in tsarist and Soviet times — but Etkind would no doubt argue that current conditions have given it greater appeal and currency.

For Etkind, conspiracy theories are a key part of the myth-making. He seems convinced they are a psychopathology and not just the cynical outpourings of a well-funded propaganda machine. Whatever its cause, the propaganda and media machine have become increasingly anti-American, Eurosceptic and homophobic, with “stopmodernism” encrypted into news channels, reality shows, sporting events and beauty contests. The very same people you might meet on a weekend in a posh Mediterranean hotel spend their working hours cursing “gay Europe” in Moscow TV studios.

Etkind paints Putin’s speech justifying the February 2022 invasion not just as an apotheosis of myth-making and conspiracy peddling, but also as a deadly rationale for genocide. For Putin, he writes,

Russians and Ukrainians are essentially the same, but some Ukrainians are Nazis and therefore different. The Americans had turned [Russia’s] Ukrainian friends into Nazis, the opposite of the Russians, who defeated Nazism and disliked the Americans… Putin was effectively declaring war against the US and its allies, not against Ukraine. Ukraine was not even a proxy: it did not exist, it was a terra nullius.

Ultimately, however, despite all these systemic factors, Etkind comes close to surrendering to a different kind of analysis by putting the onus on the personal: namely, Putin got bored and started a war. “A wiser tyrant would have deferred his inevitable end for another few years, even a decade. Impatient and bored, Putin was the unexpected nemesis of Putinism.”

A richer canvas might also have coloured in links between the authoritarian and corrupt Putinist system and his hubristic miscalculations about Ukrainian strength and resolve, Western unity and Russian military strength. This broader account might also help explain why a petrostate that in 2021 sent three-quarters of its gas exports and two-thirds of its oil exports to the European Union decided to risk all with the invasion.

Russia Against Modernity ends with a picture of the future: Russia will inevitably lose the war and begin a process of defederation. Its constituent national minorities, indigenous peoples and diverse regions will at last — after a long but hopefully not bloody transition period — gain real autonomy and democracy and move towards a gaiamodern world, leaving behind the petrostate that has exploited them. One can’t help feeling that this is more utopian dream than sober analysis, however much we might hope elements of it come true.

Sceptics may ask whether Russia is really so different from some or many developed capitalist societies in terms of the evils and dysfunctions Etkind outlines. I suspect he would say that they/we all cling to elements of paleomodernity to differing degrees, exemplified in different political and social forces competing with the gaiamodern. He would add that, as a petrostate, Russia is a more extreme and different kind of polity in terms of its interest in thwarting gaiamodernity.

Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As I have argued elsewhere, while we can debate the wisdom or morality of these actions, none represented a serious threat to Russia. And Etkind is right to see Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers and other internal issues as more of a “fetish” among the Russian elite, as he puts it, rather than a serious factor.

Etkind’s work is also valuable because he is a Russian with an intimate understanding of the country and broad international experience who brings to bear serious intellectual firepower. In one section, “The Unbearable Lightness of Western Pundits,” he beautifully skewers so-called experts like Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze who pointed to Ukrainian weaknesses and the inevitability of Russian victory just before the 2022 invasion. Another target is international relations guru John Mearsheimer, who more or less justified the invasion by saying that, if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would suffer “existentially.” Russia now has both Sweden and Finland rushing to join NATO, while Ukraine, of course, had no near-term prospect of membership.

One thing common to these generalist historians, economists and foreign policy wonks is a lack of real expertise in Russian or Ukrainian history and politics. That’s why it is vital to listen to independent Russian (and Ukrainian!) voices on the war, as well as real Western specialists. Only a few of the latter make excuses for Putin’s regime and many would see merit in the broad thrust of Etkind’s argument.

Likewise, the Russian democratic opposition almost unanimously sees the war as generated by systemic internal problems. They would agree with Aleksei Navalny, whom Etkind lauds as the champion of exposing corruption, in blaming the war on Russia’s “endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.” •

Russia Against Modernity
By Alexander Etkind | Polity Press | $30.95 | 176 pages

The post Russia’s war with the future appeared first on Inside Story.

Why Hungary, and why now? A tagline revealed that Sheridan, the Australian’s foreign editor, is just back from a week as a visiting fellow at Budapest’s Danube Institute. What the newspaper didn’t tell readers is that this evocatively named organisation is funded by the Hungarian government (via its Batthyány Lajos Foundation) as part of its breathtakingly generous bankrolling — to the tune of billions of dollars in funds, buildings and other assets, according to Foreign Policy magazine’s Ana Luiza Albuquerque — of conservative institutes based in Budapest.

The job of these institutes is to host visiting fellows like Sheridan, often for months at a time, and run seminars, publish reports and periodicals, and generally promote what Orbán calls “illiberal liberalism.” (Orbán has also described Hungary as “the last Christian conservative bastion of the Western world.”) The Danube Institute alone publishes three journals, the European Conservative, the Hungarian Review and the Hungarian Conservative. Other Budapest-based institutes with government links include the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.

Orbán’s largesse is no doubt part of the reason for the sharp rise in his stocks in recent years among English-speaking conservatives of a more hardline bent. But it is his record of four consecutive election wins since 2010 — however tainted by bribes, crackdowns and electoral tampering — that has become a talisman for those American conservatives who worry that real democracy will never guarantee them the power they want.

Prominent among Orbán’s beneficiaries is the American conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher, who crops up repeatedly in media coverage of Hungary’s cross-Atlantic appeal and has benefited from Danube Institute hospitality. Dreher is the thread running through Foreign Policy’s account of Orbán’s spending on the institutes, and he’s also the larger-than-life centrepiece of a New Yorker article investigating the appeal of Hungary’s authoritarianism for figures on the Republican right.

For Dreher, Orbán’s example is “so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” He was especially struck when Orbán told a group of visiting conservatives, “We hope you will think of Budapest as your intellectual home.”

Where Sheridan ignores Fidesz’s excesses, Dreher believes “we expect too much of these post-Communist countries if we judge them by Western standards of clean government.” He takes the credit for having persuaded Fox News’s then-presenter Tucker Carlson to broadcast a week’s worth of programs — even less critical of Orbán than Greg Sheridan’s piece — from Budapest in 2021.

But another figure also keeps appearing in the New Yorker piece. One moment he’s lunching in a bistro in Budapest wearing “a pin-striped suit and a tie from Liberty, the London clothier once favoured by Oscar Wilde.” Then he’s in his nearby office, assuring the magazine’s Andrew Marantz that his long wait for permission to attend the Budapest-hosted Conservative Political Action Conference is “merely an oversight.” (It wasn’t; Marantz’s request was eventually refused.) Here he is — with an “Ah, good, you made it!” — when Marantz slips into the conference reception at the five-star Párisi Udvar hotel. And here he is, when a friend of Dreher lends Marantz a spare pass, giving the reporter a friendly slap on the back.

This genial scamp is the eighty-year-old British journalist John O’Sullivan, who has been president of the Danube Institute since its inception in 2013. O’Sullivan has impeccable conservative credentials: he wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s and later helped draft her memoirs; he took over from William F. Buckley as editor of the New York–based National Review in 1990; he was editor-in-chief of United Press International and then executive editor of Radio Free Europe in the early 2000s.

But one job is missing from the New Yorker’s summary. During 2015 and 2016 O’Sullivan was editor of Quadrant — yes, Australia’s Quadrant — and since then he has been the magazine’s international editor. More than that, he appears to have stayed on as president of the Danube Institute throughout his editorship.

It’s strange thought: that decades-old tribune of the Australian right, Quadrant, being edited by an Englishman who also held the most senior position in a Budapest-based think tank funded by the Hungarian government. Did he continue to be paid by the institute? Did he spend much time in the Quadrant office in Sydney?

Quadrant hasn’t been entirely candid about O’Sullivan’s relations with the government of Hungary. When the magazine announced his appointment as editor in February 2015, his work at the Danube Institute was mentioned only in the past tense. I can’t find any instance where the dual role was made clear to readers during his editorship.

Even after he moved to the international editor’s job, his relationship with the institute barely rated a mention — even at the foot of a piece he wrote in September 2021 about Tucker Carlson’s “polite questioning” of Orbán (a good thing, in O’Sullivan’s view) — although he did fleetingly mention his work at the institute in a piece a couple of months later. This year the institute has cropped up a couple of times in O’Sullivan’s articles on general topics, but without any reference to its generous backer.

Other Quadrant contributors admire Hungary too (though not all contributors to O’Sullivan’s old magazine, National Review, do). Former Liberal frontbenchers Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer have all accepted invitations to speak at Danube Institute, and former diplomat (and Abbott adviser) Mark Higgie took up a fellowship there.

Unlike O’Sullivan, Sheridan is worried by one characteristic of Orbán’s Hungary: its hardline enforcement of immigration controls. But for the Australian’s foreign editor, “freedom” (whatever that means in a country fast slipping down the democracy rankings) trumps everything. Freedom, above all, from “coercive and ideological contemporary left-liberalism.”

Surely Australian conservatives haven’t caught the Hungarian disease from the more intemperate of their American counterparts? Maybe not all of them, but there are signs that Greg Sheridan has. Should he have mentioned to readers that the think tank that hosted his visit is funded by foreign minister Németh and his colleagues? I’d say so, but perhaps he sees the battle with left-liberals as so vital, and so unequal, that such niceties must be sacrificed. •

The post Dazzled on the Danube appeared first on Inside Story.

As Dan Slater and Joseph Wong remind us in their new book, Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia, authoritarianism also tends to die not with a bang but with a whimper. They set out to understand the political effects of economic transformations in Asian countries where state-building and rapid economic modernisation have been the mutually reinforcing goals of government.

This “developmental Asia,” as the authors call it, has borders that are stark but porous: no South Asian government has driven capitalist industrialisation seriously enough to be considered part of it, but former laggards like China, Vietnam and Myanmar have been able to enter after socialist economics proved a dead end.

The starting point of Development to Democracy is the observation that democratisation in developmental Asia has not been prompted by a perception among authoritarian elites that their regime faces a revolutionary threat or a looming collapse. Rather, these elites have developed a “well-founded expectation of continued stability and even continued outright victory after democratisation takes place.”

The epitome of “democratisation through strength,” as Slater and Wong call this process, was Taiwan’s transition from one-party rule in the 1980s and 1990s. Facing rising demands for reform from civil society, a growing Taiwanese-nationalist opposition and the end of the cold war, the ruling Kuomintang lifted martial law and introduced contested elections. The gamble paid off not just for Taiwan’s people — who today enjoy the highest-quality democracy in Asia — but also for the Kuomintang itself, which now forms half of a stable two-party system alongside the Democratic Progressive Party, which has its roots in the opposition movement of the 1980s.

What we should want, Slater and Wong imply, is for authoritarian regimes to act like the Kuomintang or its contemporaries in South Korea: concede from a position of strength, just past the apex of their power and popularity, giving the regime’s legatees the opportunity to compete in free and fair elections by boasting they not only made the country rich but also made it free.

Democratisation through strength is Asia’s signal contribution to the global political landscape, having given birth to robust liberal democracies in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and to a flawed but stable electoral democracy in Indonesia. Yet it also produced failed experiments with democracy in Thailand and Myanmar, and has been resisted in Singapore, China, Indochina and — until only recently — Malaysia.

Despite the book’s concern with the relationship between economic development and democratisation, Slater and Wong aren’t offering warmed-over modernisation theory: the puzzle they seek to explain is why “levels of economic development are not clearly correlated with levels of democracy in developmental Asia.”

In theory, the legacies of authoritarian developmentalism make it safe for regimes to concede democratic reforms. Having transformed the living standards of the average voter, these regimes believe that their popular legitimacy will transfer to their own party or its successor(s) in free and fair elections. The poverty reduction and social safety nets they initiated — as well as their repression of the left — means that they need not worry about distributive conflicts spiralling out of control once democracy arrives.

This “victory confidence” and “stability confidence,” per the book’s shorthand, are needed for regimes to democratise, but they don’t on their own provide the impetus for reform. Instead, Slater and Wong emphasise the contingencies that come into play when pressures for reform from below interact with the regime’s perceptions of its own strength.

Reform pressures can come in many forms, and can come simultaneously. A regime can be confronted with signals of declining legitimacy, including gains by opposition parties in stage-managed elections, the defection of middle-class groups to anti-regime movements, or nudges from democratic security benefactors (essentially, the United States).

As the case of Malaysia shows, a regime’s ability to read the signs of its incipient decline makes all the difference to its capacity to engineer a transition to democracy on its own terms. In 1998, seventeen years into his economically successful twenty-three-year stint as prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad chose to repress rather than accommodate the reformasi movement that emerged after he sacked and prosecuted his politically ambitious finance minister Anwar Ibrahim amid a dispute over the Asian financial crisis.

Mahathir’s party, UMNO, endured as the cornerstone of the Barisan Nasional government for another twenty years, but electoral gerrymandering masked a gradual erosion in its popularity. The party’s decay reached its terminus in the extravagantly corrupt prime ministership of Najib Razak, who oversaw Barisan Nasional’s first-ever election loss in 2018. The victor in that election was an opposition coalition led by Mahathir, who’d become embittered in his retirement. Najib is in jail, and after a thrashing in last November’s general election the party has been reduced to a supporting act in a coalition government led by none other than Anwar Ibrahim.

Singapore — the place where modernisation theory goes to die — could go either way. The People’s Action Party, or PAP, is exceptionally well equipped to anticipate the signs of decline and position itself to thrive in a democratic system. It has a luminous track record of economic development and competent governance. Tightly controlled elections and grassroots “consultation” processes give it regular health checks on its popular support.

But the PAP reckons those feedback mechanisms haven’t set off enough alarm bells to incentivise it to embrace reforms. Slater and Wong suggest the PAP is taking a risky path: the slump in its vote in the 2020 general election might be written off as a pandemic-era aberration, but if the government underperforms in polls due by 2025 — by which time a leadership transition is also due — the PAP will be at a fork in the road: democratise from a position of dominance or risk going down the UMNO route.

China has a quite different set of problems. Conceding to demands for political reform in 1989 would have represented what Wong and Slater call “democracy through weakness” — the precipitous collapse of an authoritarian regime — to a degree never before witnessed in developmental Asia. With China’s turn to capitalism having yet to generate broad-based prosperity, and the traumas of the Mao era still fresh in elites’ memories, a fragmented and poorly institutionalised Communist Party regime couldn’t be confident of maintaining power or stability in a more competitive system. Too weak to concede, it cracked down violently.

The tragedy of today’s China, by contrast, is that the regime has become too good at repressing dissent to receive reliable signs that its own legitimacy, and political stability more broadly, would be better served by conceding reforms. Without even the ersatz electoral processes that marked East Asia’s other developmental authoritarian regimes, or their conditional tolerance of liberal civil society, Xi Jinping’s party-state is trapped in a black box of its own making, so paranoid about its hold on power that it can’t tell the difference between politically innocuous forms of civic activity and bona fide threats to its rule.

The idea of democracy as something vouchsafed by self-interested elites doesn’t readily gel with our more romantic ideas about how political freedom is won. The notion that democracy can be fortified by the socioeconomic legacies of dictatorship can be hard to swallow, too. But Slater and Wong’s work is part of a growing body of scholarship that analyses democracy not as the outcome of a zero-sum contest between authoritarian incumbents and “people power” movements but as a product of intra-elite pacts.

Slater and Wong’s book doesn’t break new ground in terms of fresh interviews or archival research. It’s a drawing together of their own and other scholars’ work into a big-picture framework for understanding the political economy of democratisation in East Asia — one that is compelling in its analysis and thought-provoking in its implications for how governments and civil society can support democracy across the world.

Fitting democratisation ­— an intrinsically complex and contingent process — into one neat explanatory framework has its risks, of course. While Slater and Wong stress the critical role that popular pressures put on regimes in developmental Asia to reform political systems, I suspect that some country experts and scholars of social movements will feel that they overstate how much room for manoeuvre Asia’s authoritarians actually had once pressure for reform grew.

Even in the exemplary cases of Taiwan and South Korea, sustained popular protest presented elites with the choice between reform or a campaign of repression that may well have triggered greater unrest. Different observers look at the same set of facts and ask: did these regimes jump, or were they pushed?

And for a work so explicitly grounded in theories of the relationship between socioeconomic and political change, I was surprised by the minimal discussion of the ambiguous role middle classes have played in both demanding democracy and sustaining it after experiments in “democratisation through strength” are launched. Witness the highly problematic role of Thailand’s middle classes in its post-Thaksin politics, or how Indonesia’s intra-middle-class culture wars are eroding the quality of democracy there.

Slater and Wong could have enriched their analysis with more serious consideration of how popular preferences and agency augment the elite machinations they examine. After all, the middle class needs “victory confidence” and “stability confidence” too.

Yet my familiarity with Indonesia predisposes me to agree with Slater and Wong’s emphasis on the self-interested calculations of elites as a decisive factor in the emergence of durable democracies. While profound political change in Indonesia was almost inevitable once protests and riots threatened to make the country ungovernable by May 1998, the experiment with democratic reforms in the years thereafter was an “inside job” overseen by New Order holdovers. Slater and Wong are on solid ground when they observe that Indonesian democracy has survived against the odds in no small part because the old regime’s elites were assured of their ability to thrive in the new system.

But as Thailand and Myanmar make clear, democratisation through strength is a “reversible experiment” that doesn’t always bear fruit for those running it. Attempts to democratise through strength collapsed in Thailand (after Thaksin) and in Myanmar (after the National League for Democracy’s landslide election victories) because the conservatives who oversaw liberalisation realised they couldn’t effectively compete in the new system.

So what do we do with the insight that an essential precondition for democracy to take root in Asia has been authoritarian elites’ belief that democratisation won’t spell their political obsolescence?

Slater and Wong aren’t shy about taking their arguments to their logical conclusions. As they acknowledge, “one way to interpret the argument and evidence offered in this book is that democracy should only be pursued through strength.” They reject that sweeping idea, noting that it is possible for durable democracy to be born of people power movements.

Yet evidence from developmental Asia suggests that, on the probabilities, “by laying a stronger foundation for eventual stable democratic transition, gradual authoritarian strengthening is generally a preferable outcome to sudden and total authoritarian collapse” and the often-brittle democracies that emerge from the ashes.

For this reason, “we” — presumably, Western academics and policymakers — “should be looking at authoritarian regimes through lenses other than the standard lens of ‘democracy promotion.’” Instead, “authoritarian regimes that make genuine collective efforts to promote economic development, improve popular welfare, and build more predictable and durable political institutions should be offered the international community’s conditional encouragement rather than unrelenting pressure.”

As Asia feels the chill of a new cold war, it’s perhaps apt that Slater and Wong strike a retro note about the importance of encouraging state-building and development and hoping that, with a bit of luck, democracy might emerge as a side-effect. But their prescription seems oddly less relevant to Asia than to other parts of the world; indeed, it probably already describes what Western governments are doing in the region. Western aid programs and private foundations might still pay the bills for liberal civil society across developing Asia — supporting the “demand side” of the democratisation equation — but when it comes to top-level government engagement, Western policy already reflects the realpolitik that competition for influence with China demands of them.

Slater and Wong are less explicit about what their arguments offer to opposition parties and civil society. But the implication is that any struggle for change ought to prioritise reassuring authoritarian elites about their prospects in a democratic system. Perhaps one of this book’s most important contributions is to leave us with the unanswered question of how movements for democracy might thread that particular needle. •

From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia
By Dan Slater and Joseph Wong | Princeton University Press | $62.99 | 368 pages

The post Dictating democratisation appeared first on Inside Story.

You might even argue that Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is the most democratically inclined and sanest of the three parties of the right and centre right that form the new government. If the world has survived governments that included the xenophobic populists of the League (formerly the Northern League) and Silvio Berlusconi’s increasingly pro-Russian Forza Italia, there’s nothing to suggest that Meloni will be the one to bring on a Hungarian-like descent into authoritarianism.

Yet the real trickery of the Brothers-as-fascists yarn is that it ignores the impact of the upheaval in Italian politics following the corruption scandals and violence of the early 1990s. The unpalatable extremes of Italy’s postwar firmament — from the fascist-in-all-but-name Italian Social Movement, or MSI, to the Italian Communist Party — embraced moderation and chose to come in from the cold, leaving corrupt, once-powerful Christian Democrats and Socialists to seek exile in Tunisia or scurry towards whichever party offered them the best chance of rehabilitation.

That’s not to say that some cynicism isn’t in order. With the ideological battlefield no longer delineated by the Berlin Wall, the parties’ 1990s reinvention was also about self-preservation. But their leaders’ decision to jettison the illiberal components of their postwar worldview wasn’t totally devoid of sincerity.

When Massimo D’Alema was appointed as prime minister in 1998, the common perception was that his road from firebrand leader of Italy’s communist youth organisation to pro-Western social democrat had been a little too slick. Then, in what was arguably his only significant foreign-policy decision, he supported NATO’s military operation in Kosovo — to the surprise of his anti-communist detractors and the horror of his former comrades, who had assumed his pro-Western conversion had been merely for show.

Whatever the optics, the swerve away from extremism among both fascists and communists, and the dissolution of the ostentatiously corrupt Christian Democrats have served Italy reasonably well. Often at significant personal cost, leaders moved their fringe-dwelling parties into the sphere of democratic traditions. They mostly embraced the European Union, which had long been reviled by both the far right and the far left, and they became atlantisti, supportive of NATO and significantly less hostile to the United States.

The political adjustment to the collapse of communism certainly required some fancy ideological footwork, but it avoided purges, violence and recriminations, and it marked the finish of a devastating campaign of domestic terrorism. That the end of the First Republic didn’t also mark the end of Italian democracy should be cause for celebration.

Given its fifty-year history of embracing the cultural heritage of Mussolini’s reign, the post-fascist MSI’s decision to move towards respectability was just as dramatic. When the party Meloni frequented as a teenager in Rome disbanded in 1995, its more moderate members eventually congregated into a new party, the National Alliance, with leader Gianfranco Fini doing everything that needed to be done to reassure the electorate and build bridges with homeless conservatives and liberals. It was a brutal if not always frank reckoning with the MSI’s past, and it culminated in Fini’s 2003 state visit to Israel and subsequent appearances at Rome’s synagogue.

One of the reasons local commentators have been urging us to ignore that transformation and frame Meloni as a fascist is that it’s less intellectually demanding than trying to make sense of her as a homegrown conservative.

Postwar Italian politics didn’t develop a credible model of conservatism that the Brothers of Italy could claim as its own when it eventually emerged as a conservative political force in 2012. Italy never had an equivalent of Britain’s Conservative Party; there has been no Italian Benjamin Disraeli and no Italian Margaret Thatcher. In fact, since the 1990s, Italian right-wing or centre-right political parties have been quirky and idiosyncratic, dominated by strong personalities rather than ideology.

Any plans that Berlusconi, for example, may have had to bring about the liberal reforms Italy’s economy so desperately needed were quickly swept away by political scandals; the rest of his time in office became an exercise in survival rather than a chance to establish a political legacy. For its part, the Northern League embraced the most populist elements of far-right politics, but its secessionist attitude towards “thieving Rome” was never going to lay the foundation for a palatable national political force.

But Meloni hasn’t inherited a completely blank slate. One of the matrixes on offer comes from the most right-wing factions of the Christian Democrats, the party that collapsed in 1992 under the weight of the kickback scandals known as Tangentopoli. The factions, which produced leaders such as former prime minister Giulio Andreotti and former president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, were socially conservative, reactively Roman Catholic and usually strong proponents of a managed economy under the supervision (and often direct ownership) of a large state apparatus.

That economic outlook, which remains highly influential in Italy today, didn’t come out of nowhere — its cultural roots can be found in the twenty-year fascist dictatorship that preceded Italy’s cold war political ferment. Almost no contemporary Italian political leader would be willing to campaign on the need for market liberalisation. Liz Truss’s ill-fated decision to stake her leadership on unfunded tax cuts would have been unthinkable for Meloni.

A cautious approach to the economy and a respectful view of Italy’s bureaucracy is where parties on both the right and the left see themselves. The local word for it is statalismo — the inclination to favour the state’s involvement in every aspect of the country. Italian left-wing activists love to whinge about neoliberalism, but they’re putting the cart before a dead horse. Classical liberalism has never been tried in Italy; all Italians are statalisti, albeit to differing degrees.

That said, elements of Meloni’s political outlook do appear to harken back to a period when trains ran on time — or at least when people were told that trains ran on time. It’s true, for example, that the patriotism underpinning Brothers of Italy rallies may not be seen as extreme in other countries — you’d find more nationalistic fervour during a cricket match at the MCG. But since the collapse of Italian fascism’s final incarnation in 1945, most political parties have tried to keep a lid on over-the-top expressions of nationalism.

Some Italians may be happy to wave flags at soccer games; others tend to get narky when they sense that foreigners are treating the country with disdain (as happened with the Economist’s recent Truss-inspired “Welcome to Britaly” front cover). But overt expressions of italianità have usually been seen as the domain of right-wing subversives, avoided by those craving political respectability.

Meloni has brought nationalism to the table, though, along with a willingness to bristle at any perceived slight by a foreign government. The party’s name, Fratelli d’Italia, is a reference to the first verse of a particularly problematic Italian national anthem (the words could arguably be translated as “brothers and sisters of Italy”). The controversial symbol of the party, a flame in the colours of the Italian national flag, was inherited from the MSI and remains just one example of the connection between patriotism and the far-right worldview of Brothers of Italy.

There have been some other, slightly unexpected throwbacks to Mussolini’s twenty-year rule. Towards the end of the campaign, Brothers of Italy started advocating for young Italians to adopt healthy lifestyles and avoid the devianze — roughly translated as “deviances” — of modern life. Sport was held up as the antidote for the attractions of drugs, alcohol and violence (an earlier version of the party’s Facebook post promoting healthy lifestyles had included obesity and anorexia). In any other society, the promotion of healthy lifestyles may be uncontroversial; in Italy, where at least some people still remember the fascist cult of masculinity, it was big news.

The same could be said for the election of Ignazio La Russa to the key institutional role of Senate president. La Russa, a blokey Sicilian who co-founded Brothers of Italy, collects busts of Mussolini and is happy to concede that he retains a very strong emotional link to his youthful MSI militancy.

The reason none of this makes the Meloni government subversive or antidemocratic is that the cultural legacy of fascism is so pervasive in Italian society it can transcend both party politics and fascism itself. Just one example is the baffling reincarnation of corporazioni, the pre-fascist and fascist-era professional guilds and syndicates that regulated the means of production. To be a journalist in Italy, you have to be a member of a legally enshrined guild; if you want to learn how to ski, your teacher will be a member of the legally protected College of Ski Instructors (not to be mistaken for the College of Alpine Guides).

Outside medicine and the law, no equivalent of this network of professional restrictions exists in most Western countries, yet the guilds are backed by all sides of Italian politics, often to the detriment of fairness in employment and competition.

It’s against this backdrop that the Meloni government appears set to become capital-C conservative. Think of the pre-Trump Republican Party, minus the drive for small government, or the far right of Britain’s Conservative Party, minus the libertarian Thatcherites. Traditional families are now set to loom large in Italy, tempered only by the often-complicated marital arrangements of right-wing Italian politicians; the country will also remain deeply hostile to homosexuality and gay rights.

And where a modern, pro-business right wing would have used immigration policy to harness the economic benefits of desperately needed workers and help migrant communities integrate, the new government is set to treat immigrants as a burden and a threat. Meloni is, after all, the politician who in August reposted a security video of a woman being raped in the city of Piacenza by an African asylum seeker and only took it down following the desperate plea of the victim.

This may all sound horrible, but the election result could have been a lot worse. First, there’s the fact that Meloni’s strong level of support has left her ascendant over her right-wing and centre-right coalition partners, the League and Forza Italia. While Brothers of Italy claimed 26 per cent of the vote, the other two parties polled around 8 per cent each, allowing Meloni to drive a hard bargain with Berlusconi in particular — as the recent public sniping between the two leaders has demonstrated — and leave her mark on the ministerial team.

Berlusconi didn’t get everything he wanted but was able to claim the foreign ministry. Italy’s new top diplomat is the multilingual and eminently presentable Antonio Tajani, a former president of the European Parliament and a former EU commissioner, who has already vowed to increase his department’s presence in Brussels. The League received three ministries peripheral enough to keep the new ministers out of trouble, although party leader Matteo Salvini has already started to speak across portfolios and is likely to continue doing so with impunity.

But it’s on the issue of justice that Meloni made her best appointment. Carlo Nordio is a former magistrate who ran for parliament with Brothers of Italy but is widely seen as standing outside the political fray. He was part of the “Clean Hands” investigations of the 1990s that marked the end of the First Republic and was a key figure in the corruption probe linked to the construction of flood barriers around Venice.

Unlike most magistrates, Nordio has expressed concerns about the politicisation of the judicial system and has identified the dysfunctional operation of both the courts and Italy’s massively overcrowded prisons as a human rights issue. With fifty-nine people having committed suicide in custody since the beginning of the year, he has vowed to make prison conditions a top priority of his term as justice minister.

Nordio’s views may not be enough to tame or override the Brothers’ strong law-and-order tendencies — in fact, at the time of writing he appeared to be losing a battle over the application of life sentences without benefits, a particularly inhumane penalty known as ergastolo ostativo. Yet his presence as minister of justice will be a moderating force on the government.

That Meloni was able to establish a relatively pro-European and centrist cabinet and keep the more unsavoury instincts of her coalition allies at bay is a big deal. It will allow her to forge ahead with a pro-European foreign policy — the slow-burn catastrophe known as Brexit being enough to dampen, if not extinguish, her earlier Eurosceptic carry-on about the need to wrest national sovereignty back from Brussels bureaucrats.

This, in turn, will clear the way for €220 billion (A$340 billion) worth of EU Covid recovery funds to slide into the national coffers at a time when Italy needs to reassure the markets about its debt levels. Meloni used her first speech to parliament as prime minister to say she wouldn’t stand in the way of future EU integration and vowed to work pragmatically with other EU members to protect “freedom and democracy.”

Even more significantly, Meloni’s success in imposing her will on her coalition partners will allow her to keep a lid on the pro-Putin instincts of Berlusconi and the League. Berlusconi’s controversial public and private utterances about the war in Ukraine during the election campaign would have startled other EU member states, which have remained resolute in their opposition to Russia’s invasion and now face a bleak winter of high energy prices. Yet the Forza Italia leader repeatedly riffed off Putin’s talking points, claiming that the invasion was justified because of Moscow’s need to defend Russian minorities.

The pro-Russian thread that runs through Italy’s political firmament is probably the biggest untold story of the elections. The Five Star Movement, a left-wing populist party, secured more than 15 per cent of the vote in both the House of Deputies and the Senate despite its openly pro-Russian, anti-Western stance. Five Star’s strong support for Russia’s foreign policy has been rebranded as pacificism, and the party is now arguing that any support for Ukraine is likely to extend the war, and the EU needs to give peace a chance.

If we were to tally the 8 per cent that the League and Forza Italia each won in the election and Five Star’s 15 per cent, that’s around 31 per cent of Italy’s political representation working to undermine the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Had Brothers of Italy, whose members have themselves expressed pro-Russian views, added its 26 per cent to the pro-Russian camp, the European Union’s successful attempt to present a united front on the issue of Ukraine would have been undermined.

This is why Meloni’s first speech as prime minister was significant. Her vow that Italy wouldn’t give in to Russian blackmail — a reference to Moscow’s threat to turn off the gas pipeline — was a message both to the world and to her Italian allies and adversaries. The takeaway of the speech was that she wouldn’t be providing oxygen to Italy’s cross-party, pro-Russian political faction. In fact, Meloni has hitched her government’s fate to the success of the European Union, in a move that appears largely in line with the priorities of the technocratic government that preceded hers, which was led by former European Central Bank head Mario Draghi.

Nor should we overlook the significance of a woman being appointed as chair of the Council of Ministers, as the role of prime minister is known locally. For a country in which women have long been politically sidelined — with no major party led by a woman, no prominent female newspaper columnist and very few female editors — this amounts to a major breakthrough. Meloni’s election eclipses the only precedent: the Berlusconi government’s appointment of liberal politician Emma Bonino as a European commissioner in 1995.

That Meloni can also claim to come from a working-class or lower-middle-class background is also noteworthy given that Italian politics has traditionally been dominated by the upper-class establishment and its networks of support. Meloni’s preparedness to work as a waitress to support herself during the early days of her political career is at odds with the sheltered political trajectory of most Italian politicians.

None of this is to say that Meloni’s government will be a good one. But she is set to remain bound by her institutional responsibilities and committed to Italy’s role in both Europe and the world. If she loses power in Italy’s volatile parliamentary system, or if she’s booted out by the electorate, there will be no March on Rome, no demands to overturn the results and no Roman salutes. Giorgia Meloni’s election may prove to be Italy’s first real experiment with a truly conservative yet democratic government. It may be bleak, but it’s not revolutionary. •

The post Making sense of Meloni appeared first on Inside Story.

Compare that with the Senate result in 2013, for example, when the Australian Motor Enthusiast Party’s Ricky Muir won a Senate seat in Victoria despite his party attracting a primary vote of just 0.51 per cent.

This year’s close correlation was largely a result of parliament’s decision to abolish Senate group voting tickets, or GVTs, before the 2016 election. The abolition followed widespread concern that the GVT system was being exploited — via “preference harvesting” — to enable candidates with minuscule primary votes to win seats despite above-the-line voters being overwhelmingly unaware of the (party-directed) destination of their preferences.

GVTs were also used in upper house elections in four states — at least until three of them (New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia) abolished what was broadly seen as a blot on electoral democracy. In the case of Western Australia, any defence of GVTs collapsed with the election in 2021 of a candidate who had attracted just ninety-eight primary votes (0.01 per cent of a quota) and was resident in the United States at the time of his election. To compound his unsuitability, he was running on a daylight-saving platform in a region that had demonstrated minimal support for the concept in several referendums.

Victoria alone still retains GVTs, despite the fact that two upper house members were elected with a party primary vote of less than 1 per cent in 2018, and eight others with votes below 5 per cent. In statewide terms, those ten members’ primary party support ranged from 0.62 per cent to 3.75 per cent. By contrast, the Greens, with a statewide vote of 9.25 per cent, secured only one position. The other main victim of GVTs at that election was probably the Liberal Party.

Past Victorian Labor premiers John Cain (1982–90) and Steve Bracks (1999–2007) made a significant contribution to the democratisation of the state’s electoral system. It would be an understatement to observe that the current premier, Daniel Andrews, shows no such ambition.

Why? In his first term, Andrews was able to assemble an “ideological” upper house majority comprising Labor (fourteen seats) and the Greens (five) plus the Sex Party member and the Vote 1 Jobs member. In his second term, he could rely on Labor’s eighteen seats augmented by the single Greens member, the Reason (née Sex) Party member and the Animal Justice Party member.

Those numbers were critical for the approval of legislative measures — especially emergency powers — associated with Victoria’s controversial pandemic response. The government was also able to secure support from other crossbenchers on a case-by-case basis, making the composition of the upper house essentially a non-issue in the first half of the parliamentary term.

This satisfactory state of affairs for Andrews ended in mid 2020 with new revelations of extensive branch stacking in the state Labor Party, the main offender being small business and local government minister Adem Somyurek, a member of the upper house. Somyurek was dismissed from the ministry but then pre-empted his expulsion from the Labor Party by resigning to sit as an independent, denying Andrews his access to a reliable majority.

Somyurek’s absence from Labor’s Legislative Council ranks obliged the government to be more accommodating on amendments to its pandemic powers legislation in late 2021. Did it cross Andrews’s mind that Greens numbers in the upper house would have been sufficient to render the desertion irrelevant if he had abolished GVTs when he had the chance?

Recent developments threaten to make the 2018 upper house result a model of stability compared with what may emerge at this year’s election. A number of new micro-parties have registered with the Victorian Electoral Commission and can be expected to target the ballot for the Legislative Council, fully aware that a low primary vote is no necessary impediment to a well-paid four-year term on the plush red seats.

Several of these groups have been motivated by anger at the government’s strong measures on the pandemic — especially the lockdowns — and it is feasible that an effective GVT strategy could see one or more of them, including anti-vaxxers, elected. If elected, they are unlikely to see negotiation and compromise as desirable qualities in fulfilling the role.

The crowded ballot paper also makes it more likely that voters will vote 1 above the line rather than try to construct an authentic set of preferences from below, even though only five below-the-line preferences are needed for a valid vote. A strong above-the-line vote will further enhance the prospects of candidates with minimal genuine support. Fewer than 9 per cent of electors voted under the line in 2018.

Two years ago the parliamentary electoral matters committee considered GVTs as part of its review of the 2018 election. Several submissions made the powerful case for change, but the committee declined to recommend their abolition, opting to pass the buck by recommending a separate inquiry that (predictably) has not occurred. The government’s stance could well have reflected its reluctance to assist the Greens in any way, hostility towards that party being the default position in Victorian Labor. If so, it suggests an inability to distinguish between organisational and legislative priorities.

While polls continue to point to a re-elected Andrews government in November, a manageable upper house appears doubtful. Whether this will be enough to generate an interest in electoral reform in the premier remains to be seen. Perhaps it will take the election of a candidate with even fewer than ninety-eight primary votes. •

The post The above-the-liners appeared first on Inside Story.

On the internet, where most of what passes for public debate now takes place, the political temperature is permanently set to one hundred. Bad faith is the order of the day. The twenty-first-century public square is a suffocating, hyperpartisan, dopamine-fuelled dungheap of memes and nasty tweets. Every demographic group claims victimhood. Every issue provokes hysterical disagreement. Everyone is angry about everything all of the time.

For Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, the authors of the new Quarterly Essay Uncivil Wars: How Contempt Is Corroding Democracy, both sides of politics share responsibility for this discursive rot. “Something’s amiss,” they suggest at the outset. Transgender activists and their gender-critical opponents are engaged in a battle to the death. Black Americans who speak of white supremacy deploy the same language of existential erasure as the increasing numbers of white Americans who invoke the spectre of anti-white discrimination. Families, apparently, are being torn apart by political polarisation.

What unites the loudest voices on both left and right, they argue, is an attitude of sneering contemptuousness for their political opponents. Both sides live in sealed-off, alternative realities: the left, beholden to a culture of prim censoriousness and moral absolutism, resides in some kind of imaginary university campus, prosecuting thought crimes and jumping at shadows; the right, meanwhile, occupies a Fox News–induced fantasy universe of fear and resentment, eternally besieged by the traitorous and freedom-hating metropolitan elites.

For Aly and Stephens, this contemptuous approach — or rather, non-approach — to public deliberation is both dangerous and new. It is, they think, substantively different from the kind of constructive disagreement that is meant to provide democratic politics with its flexibility, dynamism and responsiveness. To view someone with contempt, they argue, is to see them as an illegitimate political actor, to judge their ideas and interests as beneath consideration. The contemned’s place in the polity is questionable, their right to participate in a deliberative, mutually respectful debate refused. They are irredeemable, unworthy, deplorable.

Aly and Stephens’s story of how and why this happened is a familiar one. In recent years, they write, the perverse algorithmic incentives of the major social media platforms have encouraged a race to the bottom: the more base and prejudicial a news item or post, the more clicks, the more advertisers, the more dollars. For the authors, this “commodification of emotion” has soured the very “air” in which political debate takes place. It has closed off the possibilities for political cooperation and participation in a shared democratic project. Unless more attention is paid to “the conditions of our common life,” they warn, democracy as we know it may cease to exist.

This posture of high moral seriousness will be familiar to regular listeners of The Minefield, Aly and Stephens’s long-running discussion program on ABC Radio National. For the past seven years they have been taking prominent weekly news items and using them as prompts for stimulating and somewhat highfalutin discussions of “the ethical and moral dilemmas of modern life.” This year alone they have picked apart topics as diverse as hunger, ambivalence, housing affordability, the Ukraine conflict, the Religious Discrimination Bill and the television series Succession.

As a duo, they have an entertaining dynamic. Both are preternaturally articulate and argumentative. Stephens, who moonlights as the editor of the ABC’s Religion and Ethics section, is loquacious and widely read in political and moral philosophy. Aly, a media polymath with a high-profile side gig on Channel Ten’s The Project, has a more lawyerly manner, and is naturally inclined to take a sceptical or contrarian view. At times it seems as if he stands by with a sewing needle, waiting to deflate each new hot air balloon sent up by his excitable co-host.

By passing regular moral judgement on matters of public concern, both fit the definition of what we used to call public intellectuals. Both are consummate media performers, ready to offer their thoughts on almost any topic. Like all good public intellectuals, too, they tend to divide opinion. For some, their posture of good-natured intellectual detachment is refreshing, floating loftily above the catfights and mudslinging of the daily news cycle. For others, though, it all comes across as impossibly smug, a nationally syndicated graduate seminar run by two self-indulgent know-alls.

Either way, the impeccably courteous atmosphere of The Minefield provides a working model for the kind of respectful deliberation both would prefer to see in broader public discussion. Both delight in doubt and uncertainty, in moral ambiguities and ethical grey areas. As they often cheerfully admit, they are prone to finish each show even more confused than when they began. In this respect, Albert Camus’s epigraph to their Quarterly Essay reads almost like a motto: “We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right.”

In Uncivil Wars, Aly and Stephens take the Minefield formula and pursue it at essay length. The central problem they seek to pick apart — incivility in public debate — is presented as a matter of existential urgency. Their overall diagnosis — an excess of contempt — is defined in highly abstract terms. The arguments they provide are self-consciously polemical, their philosophising a provocation, their generalisations an invitation to further debate. And their discussion of how it all plays out is shot through with grand moral language: vengeance, shame, envy, anger, resentment, justice and forgiveness.

Despite Aly and Stephens’s posture of detachment, though, it is the left that seems to receive the brunt of their censure. The key illustrative examples they use to frame the essay are not the more overt Schmittian “friend and enemy” politics of the new populist right, but rather Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterisation of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and, closer to home, the Stop Adani anti-coal convoy that toured regional towns in the weeks leading up the 2019 federal election.

In the standard narrative that has formed around these two events, both have come to be seen as mistakes or turning points for the left, moments when establishment liberal elites inadvertently revealed their contempt for the forgotten people they were ostensibly trying to persuade. The result, per this interpretation, was that working people were driven to vote for right-wing politicians in protest. If only Clinton had not been so rude to Trump voters, they might yet have been persuaded not to vote for him; if only the Stop Adani protesters had invited the coalminers into their homes for tea and coffee, Labor might not have lost in Queensland.

This, to me, seems a rather naive reading of these events. Without a radical change in Labor’s policy, it is unlikely that much could have been said to people in rural Queensland to prevent them from voting in what they perceived to be their own interests. Clinton’s “deplorables” comment might have backfired as a political strategy, but it was nevertheless a pretty clear statement of her own political beliefs and those of her core constituency: the much-maligned urban white-collar professional managerial class.

Democratic politics is not always about consensus. It is also a way of working out the issues on which we disagree. That the interests of metropolitan voters did not align with those who were drawn to Trump is largely the point.

In a general sense, Aly and Stephens are right: something really is amiss. Since 2016, or perhaps 2008, many of the world’s major liberal democracies have looked much less robust than they once did. The number of simultaneous crises to be navigated is so overwhelming — climate change, geopolitical tensions, deglobalisation, war in Europe, inflation, pandemic, obscene wealth inequality and the resurgence of class politics — that some have taken to calling it a “polycrisis.” In this environment, established political parties and media institutions have faced continuing tests of their legitimacy. By any measure, these are genuinely concerning times.

The argument of Uncivil Wars, though, is that contempt and incivility are not merely symptoms of these concurrent crises: they are the cause. The teetering liberal democracies of the West will not survive the mounting threats to their existence, Aly and Stephens suggest, unless everyone can agree to put down their weapons and show a little kindness and respect. In the abstract, it is hard to disagree with such an argument: no popular, broad-based political movement was ever built without some element of mutual consideration, constructiveness and cooperation.

But we should not pretend that because public discourse has a contemptuous tone, a kind of equivalence exists between the political agendas of left and right, or between the quality of the solutions each proposes for the resolution of our social ills. For all the posturing and moral policing of the most annoying sections of the online liberal left, and for all the blind spots and unconscious biases of the “mainstream media,” there is still no liberal equivalent of Fox News, an organisation so flagrantly hostile to democratic norms that it is actively undermining the functioning of the American republic.

Aly and Stephens do not have any particular sympathy with the reactionary right wing of American politics. But when they suggest that the fascist inclinations and genuine illiberalism of the new American right has its mirror on the left, in the form of cancel culture and political correctness, they echo one of its most ridiculous talking points. Being mean to each other on the internet is not the same as denying someone’s political rights. As the authors’ own historical examples attest, hostile argument, straw manning of your opponents, exaggeration, partisanship — even incivility — have been features of democratic politics for much of modernity, regardless of the media environment.

Indeed, as Aly and Stephens concede, there are also circumstances where contempt is in fact justifiable and even politically productive, especially when it is directed “upward” towards those who wield power. In such circumstances, they write, appeals for civility in public debate — appeals for less contempt — function mostly as a means of stifling dissent. Contempt for a common enemy might instead be thought of as a way of building a political coalition. If the ends justify the means, it could even be considered a political virtue.

Aly and Stephens are correct to observe that the political “air quality” has become increasingly toxic, and that this sometimes undermines our ability to seek common ground. Stopping the rot in our democracies, though, requires more than simple policing of the way we talk to each other. If we have any hope of building political coalitions capable of seriously addressing the polycrisis, we will need to find more accurate and persuasive ways to make sense of the mess we are in.

Of course we shouldn’t pretend our answers to these questions are always absolutely right. But we shouldn’t be afraid to say when the other side is absolutely wrong. And if this means showing some “upward contempt” towards those whom our malfunctioning political system currently benefits, so be it. By pointing the finger at both sides, Uncivil Wars provides no real case for what should be changed and how we should change it. In the end, it comes across as mere moralising. •

The post Flame wars appeared first on Inside Story.

Melbourne University’s Michael Wesley goes through some of this history in his lead essay for Australian Foreign Affairs. He shows Australia clinging to its diminishing status in London as one of the “white dominions” and then falling in with the United States in its suspicion of India’s Soviet ties and sanctions over its nuclear tests — before having to play catch-up when Washington, London and Paris decided a nuclear Indian superpower was needed.

Wesley points out the dilemma for Canberra. “Its foreign policy has tended to be ‘heliocentric’ — the major elements of its statecraft are shaped by its commitment to a single major ally,” he writes. That single ally — first Britain, then the United States — has always been culturally similar. “Heliocentrism has enshrined a presidential element to policy formulation, with the prime minister taking personal charge of relations with the major ally. It has also resulted in Australia looking at the world from the same perspective as a global power, rather than as an isolated country with limited capabilities.”

Hence our expectation to be heard in global councils, our willingness to join military expeditions, and our past contempt for Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-aligned foreign policy. In return, we drew contempt from New Delhi’s external affairs ministry, its suspicion of America only recently fading, as the monkey to the Washington organ-grinder.

This heliocentrism is now deeply challenged, says Wesley. “The US investment in a relationship with India signals an admission that America has neither the capacity nor the stomach to face China alone. Washington has ceded its pre-eminence in the Pacific to an order in which China and the United States become two among a series of great powers — including Indonesia and Japan — seeking to prevent any single state from dominating the region.”

This shift has clearly not yet sunk in among Canberra foreign policymakers. Our diplomats and security analysts are still pushing for India to stop acquiring Russian-supplied armaments and buy American in the name of “interoperability” with the other Quad members. With New Delhi proceeding with the purchase of the powerful S-400 air defence system from Russia in spite of threatened US sanctions — a similar purchase got NATO ally Turkey barred from the F-35 fighter program — Canberra will be put in an awkward spot if neither partner backs down.

India is unlikely to transform into another dutiful US ally like Japan and Australia. But it would help us adjust out of heliocentrism if India displays the kind of kindred liberal democratic and free-market values cited by exponents of a closer embrace.

Will it? Indian journalist Debasish Roy Chowdhury and Sydney University political scientist John Keane offer a dismaying portrait of neglect and institutional decay. The world’s “biggest democracy” is an “endangered” one in its “death stages,” characterised by dark money, manipulated media and muscle power, its people at risk from toxic air, poisoned water, and (as Covid has shown) disease.

The authors of To Kill a Democracy believe the seeds of decay were planted soon after independence when Nehru echoed the 1835 advice of Thomas Babington Macaulay that higher education for the upper classes was more useful than basic education for the masses. In Nehru’s case, he wanted brains to run the institutions of state and his new industrial “temples of modernity.”

That neglect has left India with an employment gap between agriculture and the booming but relatively low-labour services sector. A huge pool of jobless young has been waiting for a demagogue like Narendra Modi to enlist them as stormtroopers in a quest to turn the secular Indian state into a Hindu one.

A first-past-the-post electoral system allowed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to translate a 37 per cent vote into an absolute majority of seats. With anti-defection laws reducing MPs to ciphers, cabinet cowed and civil servants at risk of transfer to remote posts, Modi and his authoritarian home minister Amit Shah are the government. That makes for decisive but sometimes disastrous decisions, as when Modi suddenly “de-monetised” large-value banknotes in 2016 in an effort to flush out the black economy. Representing 86 per of cash in circulation in an economy overwhelmingly reliant on cash transactions, the move paralysed the economy.

The book’s most dispiriting passage concerns the abject complicity of the widely respected Supreme Court of India, under former chief justice Ranjan Gogoi, in Modi’s manoeuvres against Muslims, notably his overnight abolition of Kashmir’s autonomous statehood and his National Register of Citizens, which was used to remove citizenship from some 1.9 million Muslims in Assam.

All this has been played down by Quad enthusiasts. Modi has had a warm rapport with Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump. As Wesley writes, “There are elements of his populist political style and can-do approach to governance that appeal to conservative leaders, who are more likely to overlook his government’s chauvinistic approach to communal relations at home.”

Fortunately, Australia’s Indian diaspora seems to be bringing the best of India with them, eager for space, a clean environment and less competition for jobs. Aarti Betigeri, a journalist living in Australia, writes a stand-out essay for India Rising? from inside this diaspora, which is, or soon will be, our biggest new migrant cohort and one that is moving rapidly up the echelons of our institutions and companies — though not yet in politics, as its numbers would suggest, because it associates in divergent language, caste and other interest groups.

Betigeri believes the hunger to migrate has been thoroughly exploited by Australia:

We have set the intake pipeline so that it benefits Australia at every stage. First, students pay huge sums of money to study here (usually it’s their parents’ life savings, or land is sold to finance the fees). Then, while they’re studying, they provide a cheap, readily available and compliant source of unskilled labour. After graduation, they take on unpaid internships of three to six months, living off their savings, or fitting in overnight shifts at the servo to pay the rent. Then they emerge, fully trained, with an Australian education, ready to join the workforce, fuelling our economic growth. At every stage, the benefits are stacked in Australia’s favour. The house always wins.

The ever-higher bar of Home Affairs criteria for converting temporary residence into citizenship is another grievance. The Morrison government’s treatment of foreign students during the pandemic — go home or fend for yourselves — and its ban on flights from India at the height of the Delta variant panic have hardly improved Australia’s external image.

That adverse perceptions are prone to persist is shown in Harsh V. Pant’s essay for India Rising? on the view of Australia from India. He opens by recalling the wave of attacks on Indian students in Sydney and Melbourne in 2009–10, which he accepts as mostly racially motivated and epitomising a “social and political gap” between India and Australia. But street-level enquiries by Indian diplomats revealed that nearly all the attacks were made by disadvantaged teenagers set on stealing mobile phones and bling from relatively well-off students in the outer suburbs to which they had been dispersed by the gentrification of old inner-city student quarters,.

From New Delhi, Amit Dasgupta, the Indian consul-general in Sydney at the time, tells me, “I had said then and maintain even now that, with the exception of a few, the majority of the attacks were not racist and to allege them as such is incorrect.” That even Pant, a professor in international relations at King’s College, London, is still swayed by the hyped-up “news” generated by India’s hectic new electronic channels and websites illustrates the dangers of a debased media that has only flourished and become more chauvinist under Modi.

Such is the degree of intimidation that Oxford University Press has opted out of producing a cheaper edition of the Roy Chowdhury and Keane book for the Indian market. This followed a warning in the journal of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the militant Hindu-nationalist movement from which Modi sprang.

While the strategic partnership between Australia and India won’t follow the US alliance model, economic ties seem likely to grow steadily, and an essay about this would have rounded out this issue of Australian Foreign Affairs. The Morrison government is again talking up the free-trade agreement shelved soon after Abbott and Modi announced talks. This is again raising unrealistic hopes.

As Peter Varghese, author of An India Economic Strategy to 2035 for the Australian government, put it to me earlier this year, India is “deeply protectionist and unlikely to fundamentally change.” He says India is an “investment story” requiring Australian businesses to get in behind India’s protective barriers and develop a domestic business — a big call for Australia’s parochial and short term–minded business community. “I think it would be a mistake to overinvest in getting a free-trade agreement done because it will just distract the relationship for a considerable period of time with a limited prospect of success,” Varghese said. “And there’s a heck of a lot of things you can do without an FTA.”

On the shared values front, the old secular India may be pushing back. As Roy Chowdhury and Keane admit, India may still have the world’s largest pool of illiterates, but adult literacy grew from 12 per cent in 1947 to 74 per cent in the latest census, in 2011. Mobile phones and the internet have empowered and enlightened, as well as being channels for bigotry and porn. Political cultures in the non-Hindi language states and lower-caste mobilisation also stand in Modi’s way: in the important West Bengal state elections this year, the fiery chief minister and leader of a Congress Party splinter, Mamata Banerjee, roundly beat Modi’s BJP.

The Supreme Court may also be regaining its nerve under a new chief justice. This year it accepted public interest litigation from a group of Modi critics who found their mobile phones infected by Israeli spyware available only to governments. The court rejected the government’s attempt to assert national-interest secrecy, and set up its own independent commission to investigate.

And this month, Modi abruptly announced the withdrawal of his new agricultural laws that would have ditched guaranteed prices and government purchases of major crops, and left individual farmers to deal directly with emerging giant retail chains. Until suspended by the Supreme Court in January, the laws drew a blockade of New Delhi by farmers and their tractors. Over 600 died in clashes with police, as Modi’s spokespeople called the protesters “traitors” and “terrorists.”

With state elections approaching in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, from where many of the protesting farmers came, the Indian prime minister is backing off. Perhaps we have seen peak Modi. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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It is easy to be cynical about such pessimism. Doom prophets are as old as the sun. But even if you don’t go in for crisis chatter, you would be hard-pressed to deny that some of the world’s most mature democracies are facing some serious headwinds. Many of the culprits are so familiar that they need no more than a passing mention: competing varieties of right-wing populism led by the totemic shocks of Trump and Brexit; new forms of authoritarianism stifling opposition in Hungary, Turkey and Brazil; crude ethnic nationalism gaining electoral traction in almost every European country, a kind of domino theory for our time.

Jan-Werner Müller, a political philosopher from Princeton, knows his way around this public end-of-democracy seminar. In fact, he was one of the first cabs off the rank with his 2016 book What Is Populism?, one of the most clear-sighted early attempts to identify the many family resemblances among the new “Populist International.” It is his view, then and now, that what ultimately connects figures as diverse as Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi and Hugo Chávez is their rejection of political and cultural pluralism. In Müller’s conception, wrote one critic, populism is democracy’s “anti-pluralist, moralistic shadow.”

Naturally, then, Müller’s new book, Democracy Rules, turns the mirror around. Rather than opine further about the shape of populist threat, as most of the doom prophets have done in recent years, he attempts to shift the focus back onto democracy’s own first principles. If we choose to think seriously about what democracy actually is, he implies, we might see more clearly what it is that we are trying to defend. The ultimate question for our times is not “what is populism?” but “what is democracy?”

Of course, we don’t need to frame all our ideas about democracy as a response to the new “autocratising regimes.” But neither can we deny that it is the existence of these regimes that is bringing such urgency to the latest wave of democratic soul-searching. One of the features of the new right-wing populism, after all, is the way it presents itself as being fundamentally democratic. Unlike “paradigmatic” twentieth-century fascism, to which it is typically compared, populism is much less openly hostile to democracy itself. Populists instead seize power by exploiting democracy’s institutions, if only so they may undermine them. This is democracy’s paradox and its fatal flaw: it is a system that tolerates its opponents.

Taking that logic to its extreme, the new authoritarians claim they are actually arch-democrats reflecting the will of the people. At this point, the debate is enveloped in a fog of partisanship. Trump, for example, never openly entertains the idea that he is subverting democracy: he simply won the 2020 election. His opponents saw illiberalism everywhere they looked: friendly appointments, political favours, wall-building. Figuring out whether populist political movements represent genuine threats to democracy seems to be more art than science. But even so, says Müller, there must be a nonpartisan way to draw a line between ordinary democratic friction and pernicious polarisation.

The answer, in his view, is to maintain a fundamentally democratic idea of “the people.” Put simply: you cannot expel or disenfranchise citizens, or attempt to limit their participation in the political process. This is democracy’s “hard border”: cross it, and you pose a threat to democracy itself. Governing on behalf of a particular constituency or political coalition might be a normal part of the democratic process, but framing your political rivals as enemies of the state and stripping them of political rights is the threshold at which the backsliding begins.

What ultimately protects democracy against itself, argues Müller, is its “critical infrastructure”: political parties and the media. In an ideal world, these institutions act like shock absorbers for new political demands — as a means by which citizens can participate in the political process and affect political outcomes. And crucially, they provide a way to define the boundaries of political debate in increasingly complex modern societies. They create the “visions of divisions” over which elections are typically fought.

For Müller, the health of democracy is directly tied to the accessibility and smooth functioning of these mediating institutions. This is unfortunate, because both parties and the media have been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy for a while now.

Major political parties have begun to resemble oligarchies. Rather than functioning as “laboratories” for new political ideas, in the Gramscian sense, many are proscribing certain ways of thinking and limiting internal dissent. In some countries, too, dark money floods the political system, creating drastic inequality at the level of political influence. All of this breeds further cynicism and compounds democracy’s crisis.

The advent of social media, meanwhile, has blown up traditional ways of delivering news, put a price on “virality” and turbocharged the fragmentation of the public sphere. Accurate and “assessable” facts are getting harder to come by. Certain types of politicians exploit the situation, peddling disinformation and manufacturing confusion (or, as Steve Bannon puts it, “flooding the zone with shit”).

Müller proposes a number of fixes for these problems, none of which really sets the heart racing. On the issue of dark money, for example, he explores the idea of a voucher system: large donations would be banned, and every citizen would instead receive an equal amount of money to be allocated to the party or candidate of their choice. This seems practical and achievable. Applying the same concept to the media, however — creating a constellation of “transparently partisan” non-profit news co-ops — seems beyond my own personal Overton window.

We can haggle over the details, but the underlying rationale of such schemes is nevertheless sound: to encourage political participation, and to discourage passivity, cynicism and the suspicion that the game is rigged. Both political parties and the media have become increasingly unresponsive to the changing demands of societies — that is, they have become less democratic — and as such they have begun to lose their legitimacy. If we want to protect democracy, we need to find ways to re-democratise its mediating institutions.

Ultimately, though, democracy can’t be protected by laws and decrees alone. It needs believers — and enough of them to keep the game going. All of us have a role to play. There are such things as “democracy-enhancing” behaviours, Müller thinks, acts of generosity and good faith that can create virtuous cycles of political engagement and reciprocity. Reading this, I could not help but think of Barack Obama, a democratic true believer, whose insistence that there be no red states and blue states was exploited mercilessly by his intransigent opponents. Obama’s good faith, say his critics, was simple political naivety. Politics is not for nice guys.

Müller is not so cynical. There are always the examples of figures like Martin Luther King and Edward Snowden, rule breakers who sought to restore the “spirit behind the rules.” But the defenders of democracy nevertheless find themselves in a difficult position. If your only response to the illiberalism and bad faith of your opponents is high-minded platitudes and good-faith gestures, you risk losing it all. Democracy-enhancing behaviours appear to be of little use to the systematically disenfranchised opponents of the Hungarian and Turkish regimes. But to do the opposite — to meet illiberalism with illiberalism — risks undermining the very principles you are seeking to defend, and there may be no coming back.

This is not to engage in bothsidesism or to suggest that prominent left responses to right-wing populism in recent years are themselves illiberal. In fact, the idea that politicians like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn represent some kind of left authoritarianism is grossly overstated. Rather, both are healthy examples of the political party as laboratory: a partisan political organisation that shifts and reshapes its agenda in response to internal dissent. Neither Corbyn nor Sanders formed new parties, but instead sought to reform existing ones. Both relied heavily on real grassroots support, and neither sought to exclude or demonise particular groups from the political process. They did in fact lead highly democratic movements.

By contrast, the new populists are intensely undemocratic. They project muscular, uncompromising personas. Some maintain autocratic control over their own parties. (Geert Wilders’s far-right party in the Netherlands has two members, both of whom are Geert Wilders.) They aim not just to defeat their opponents but to keep defeating them, to dominate. Like mafiosi, they rig the game. True winners, they believe, don’t need to pretend their opponents have anything worthwhile to contribute. As Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump enthusiast, is known to say, “competition is for losers.” To compromise or show sympathy is weak and effete. It’s loser talk.

For Müller, this is exactly the point. Democracy is for losers. It is “a political system in which parties lose elections” (although, he adds, it is not one in which the same party loses elections). In a functioning democracy, the losers can always plausibly entertain the idea that they will one day win. To defend democracy, they must defend the right of winners to rule over them, and the winners must defend the right of losers to continue to participate in the political process. Both sides must accept the fact that their opponents are in some way legitimate. You can be against the government, but you cannot be against the political system.

It is often said that the new populists thrive on division, but what they really crave is the opposite: predictability and control. Conflict and disagreement, on the other hand, breed uncertainty — especially when combined with regular elections. And that, for Müller, is all democracy is: “institutionalised uncertainty.” Electoral outcomes cannot be preordained. Citizens must accept disagreement in perpetuity. Priorities change, the losers regroup, and everyone tries again. The movie never ends — it goes on and on and on and on. •

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Navalny, a long-time critic of Putin, first made his name as a blogger who brought to light corruption throughout the country, including among those at the highest political levels. He has also sought to enter politics directly: as the figurehead leader of the 2011–12 fraudulent elections demonstrations, as a candidate for the Moscow mayoralty in 2013, and as a candidate for president in 2018. He has focused his criticisms on Putin, whom he accuses of being corrupt. For his efforts, he has frequently been arrested, has been held for short periods when he has sought to attend demonstrations, has been subject to criminal charges for fraud (which he denies), and was found guilty of embezzlement and given a five-year suspended sentence. His brother has also been arrested and incarcerated.

Most recently, while travelling in Siberia, Navalny was poisoned and nearly died. After being taken to a Russian hospital in Omsk in a coma, he was airlifted to Berlin — at the insistence of his wife and supporters — four days later. Navalny and his supporters claim he was poisoned by an agent of the Russian security services, the FSB, acting on the orders of Vladimir Putin; the German doctors say that the poisoning agent was a type of novichok, which is said to be available only to the Russian government. He appears to have made a full recovery.

Some aspects of that episode are curious, but I will not go into them here. What is important for Russia’s political trajectory is that Navalny’s supporters both within that country and in the West believe that the Russian government and Putin himself were responsible for the attempt on his life.

In an immediate sense, the Navalny episode poses three different sorts of challenge to Putin’s rule: direct action from the streets, delegitimisation, and increased economic hardship.

The potency of the street demonstrations depends partly on the strength of Navalny’s support. We don’t know for certain what proportion of Russians support him and what he is doing, and how many of them would be willing to risk engaging in protest activity. Supporters of Navalny always exaggerate the size of the crowds he attracts and the extent of his support, while opponents understate both; estimates of the crowd in Moscow on 23 January ranged from 4000 to 40,000 (with a lower reported number on 31 January).

What we do know is that when Navalny stood on the ballot for Moscow mayor in 2013 he officially received 27.2 per cent of the vote — and if the claims about falsification are accurate, presumably more. Given the sympathy generated by his poisoning, it is likely that his support has grown since then. Regardless, a solid core of support exists in the capital, but there is no evidence that this even approaches half of the capital’s populace. And it isn’t clear that even this level of support can be replicated throughout the country. We just don’t know.

Overall support is one thing, strategic support another. A loss of control in the streets of the capital is politically much more significant for the government than in other parts of the country. Election statistics show that the popular vote for Putin and the forces aligned with him tends to be lower in Moscow than elsewhere, so the capital would seem to be fertile ground for the Navalny forces. This is especially so because Navalny has become a lightning rod for the expression of broader grievances; many at the protests appear more motivated by the call to remove Putin than support for Navalny.

Since the colour revolutions in the early 2000s — and especially the “Maidan revolution” in Ukraine in 2014 — Putin has shown himself to be highly sensitive to anti-regime mobilisation. Over the past decade and a half a whole series of measures has been introduced to limit the capacity of the citizenry to protest and demonstrate. Perhaps most importantly, the demonstrations over the past two weekends (with more promised) were met with significant force from the police. The early introduction of force is new and clearly designed to deter people from continuing to take to the streets.

But even if we assume such demonstrations continue, do they pose an existential threat to the regime? Studies of regime change show that many more regimes fall as a result of division and conflict within the ruling group than in response to mass mobilisation. While the group around Putin stays united and the coercive arms of the state — military, security and police forces — remain loyal, the regime is likely to see off this challenge. That seems to be the lesson of Belarus: president Alexander Lukashenko has retained power despite months of popular protest because he still has the support of the ruling elite and its coercive apparatus.

The second immediate challenge is that of delegitimisation, of which Navalny’s movement supplies three potential sources. One is that the regime’s treatment of the demonstrators erodes the social contract — which swaps passivity for material welfare — underpinning Putin’s regime. That contract is already under pressure because of the economic slowdown, and an image of the regime turning on its citizens could test it even more.

Another source of potential delegitimisation arises from Navalny’s continuing campaign against Putin as corrupt. This hit a new height last week when Navalny’s organisation released a video claiming that a sumptuous palace on the Black Sea coast was built for Putin. Putin has denied that the palace belongs to him (the wording has been careful, and ownership has since been claimed by businessman and long-time Putin friend Arkady Rotenberg), but the video has had massive exposure through YouTube. The danger for Putin is clear: when Navalny released a similar video claiming to document evidence of the corrupt and luxurious lifestyle of prime minister Dmitri Medvedev, Medvedev’s public approval ratings plummeted.

The other source of potential delegitimisation is Navalny’s challenge to the idea that no alternative exists to Vladimir Putin as Russian leader. If his projection as a potential leader with gravitas were to take hold, the popular reluctance to oppose Putin may be considerably weakened. For this to work, Navalny would need to come up with a more substantial policy program and live down some of the public positions he has espoused in the past. Following the election of Donald Trump, who is to say this is impossible?

The third immediate challenge is increased economic hardship. There has been talk within both the United States and the European Union about the imposition of further sanctions on Russia in response to the Navalny arrest. Even before Covid-19, existing sanctions were affecting the country’s economic performance; expanded, they would presumably do further damage.

But intensified sanctions would also buttress one of the themes Putin has used to consolidate his rule: Russia is in a battle with the West. With the Biden administration yet to articulate a clear Russian strategy, the ratcheting up of sanctions would get any possible reset of relations off to a poor start. And it isn’t clear that this would have any effect on the regime’s policy towards Navalny; it would simply strengthen Putin’s argument about inveterate Western opposition and the consequent need for a strong leader to stand up to them.

But the greatest challenge posed by Navalny may only become manifest during the elections for the State Duma (the parliament) in September this year. One of Navalny’s successes lies in constructing a nationwide network of organisations to help voters cast their ballots against the ruling pro-Putin party, United Russia. Like the level of Navalny’s popular support, the dimensions of this network are unclear, but it has undoubtedly had some success in regional elections in different parts of the country.

The emergence of this network parallels the decline of United Russia, in terms of both its popular support as measured by opinion polls and, it seems, its capacity to act as an effective and efficient electoral machine. The party relies fundamentally on the support of Putin-aligned regional officials, something Putin may have tried to shore up with last year’s change to the constitution, which enables him to run for another term in 2024. By preventing his becoming a lame duck, the amendment may have been designed to deter officials from transferring their allegiance to someone who would be around after Putin left in 2024.

For some time, observers have been suggesting that United Russia is not the electoral machine it once was because of wavering regional officials. If the party is less able to get out the vote and the Navalny machine is active in the area, electoral support for United Russia could plummet. And that could lead to manipulation of the election campaign and falsification of the ballot to ensure United Russia is victorious, something which — as the 2011 and 2012 demonstrations showed — can bring people onto the streets in greater numbers than have been evident over the past two weekends.

No one knows where the situation would lead if September’s election is seen as fraudulent and many more protesters take to the streets. Would it lead to splits among the ruling group, or to sections of the coercive arms of the state deserting those rulers for the demonstrating citizenry? Would it make the immediate challenges outlined above more potent? If any of these were to eventuate, the possibility of regime change would increase. And this means that the key to regime change probably lies more in the medium-term consequences of the work of the Navalny machine than in the demonstrations we have thus far seen. •

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Preferential voting — known as “ranked-choice voting” in America — has now been adopted by ballot initiative (a kind of citizens-initiated referendum) in two states: Maine, in 2018, and now Alaska for all post-2020 elections.

How did the two northernmost states in the Union come to adopt a voting system that has been used for over a century in Australia but remains largely unknown in the United States? Like many aspects of American politics today, the answer is to be found in the increasing dysfunction and polarisation of American electoral democracy.

Although it would typically elect the same candidate as a standard US-style plurality contest, preferential voting offers politicians a different route to victory, and thus different incentives.

In close contests, as Australian politicians know, it pays to attract not just a strong primary vote but also a healthy flow of preferences from minor parties and independent candidates. Labor, for instance, would never win a federal election in the absence of preference flows from the roughly 10 per cent of the electorate who support the Greens — which explains the unwillingness of Anthony Albanese and Mark Butler to indulge Joel Fitzgibbon’s road-to-nowhere plan to renege on Labor’s climate commitments.

Transferred to the United States, preferential voting means that a supporter of the Libertarian Party — which garnered 1.2 per cent of the national vote in 2020 — could avoid helping split the conservative vote (as arguably happened in several states this time). Similarly, America’s Green voters could give their second preference to the more pro-environment of the major parties, just as their counterparts do in Australia.

But a newfound embrace of minor parties is not what is driving this reform. Rather, ranked-choice voting is seen as a way to shift the tone of American politics in a more civil and cooperative direction, or at least a less negative and polarising one.

America’s combination of primary elections with plurality (and non-compulsory) voting means that centrist voters face an invidious choice at the ballot box. In 2020, this was typically between a pro-Trump Republican and an increasingly left-wing Democrat.

The political centre, where many American voters still profess to be, has emptied out. As former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower put it, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

Where compulsory and preferential voting pushes Australian politicians to contest the political centre, the incentives push the other way in the United States — towards mobilising one’s base vote.

Party primaries are prone to capture by radicals on both sides who want to ensure that only “pure” ideologues and true believers nominate. The most effective way to do this is by advocating the kind of extreme policies that are highly attractive to party diehards but may repel everyone else.

By rewarding those with broader appeal, preferential voting can deter such extremism. Candidates who command a solid base of support but attract few preferences from others — Donald Trump, for example — are less likely to be nominated and win under preferential voting than under plurality rules. Switching to preferential elections at all levels, from primaries to presidential contests, is thus seen as a way to bring back the “missing middle” in American politics.

While the idea of giving voters the opportunity to rank candidates is familiar and indeed unremarkable to Australians, it is being hailed as a major reform in the United States. As democracy scholar Larry Diamond put it, “Many reforms are needed, but ranked-choice voting can be the Archimedean lever of change, enabling a small force to move a great weight.”

Maine shows how this can work in practice. After repeated split-vote wins by divisive Republican governor Paul LePage — who styled himself as “Trump before Trump” — a grassroots movement pushed for and won a ballot initiative in 2016 to introduce preferential voting. When this was stymied by the legislature, Maine voters forced the change via a special “people’s veto,” overriding the politicians.

In Maine’s first use of ranked-choice, in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrat Jared Golden won the state’s knife-edge 2nd congressional district by securing enough preferences from two Independents to leap over the Republican incumbent.

Golden’s receipt of what turned out to be an election-deciding flow of preferences came after he publicly pledged to reciprocate with his own rankings, signalling to Democrat voters to do the same. His Republican rival, by contrast, spurned the idea and hence received few preference flows from excluded candidates — becoming the first incumbent to lose the district in over a century.

While cooperative signalling of this kind can make sense under preferential voting, under plurality rules there is nothing to be lost by “going negative” in campaigns.

Golden’s upset victory led to a series of legal challenges (and the Republican state secretary’s scrawling “stolen election” on the official certification of results), but the system was upheld by the courts and Golden was elected again, with much less drama, in November 2020.

At that same election, on the other side of the continent, Alaskan voters narrowly approved a proposal to adopt preferential voting as well, along with new disclosure requirements to prevent “dark money” in politics. In a new and potentially influential twist, the state’s preferential contest will take place after a single primary election for all parties, with the four best-polling candidates going on to a general election in which voters can rank from one to four.

The Alaska campaign benefited from a cross-party coalition of Independents, Libertarians, Democrats and some Republicans. By contrast, a similar initiative in Massachusetts championed predominantly by the Democrats failed to win majority support on 3 November.

Whether preferential voting can actually lower the temperature of American politics in the hyper-polarisation of the post-Trump era remains to be seen. Studies from other jurisdictions that use ranked ballots — including Australia, Papua New Guinea and over a dozen American cities and local governments — have found that they produce more moderation than plurality elections. But these either tend to be non-partisan contests, in the case of local elections, or have very different political cultures.

Nonetheless, leading American thinkers have seized on the idea of preferential voting as “the leading institutional reform that could potentially reduce polarisation in the country,” as the high-profile political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it. Others endorsing preferential voting include Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, the late John McCain, newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Economist, five winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, and nine winners, including Fukuyama, of the Skytte Prize, the highest honour in political science.

Amid this heavyweight support, the unlikely duo of Maine and Alaska — blue-collar, rural and remote — have thus become testing grounds for whether a seemingly modest electoral reform can help arrest America’s democratic decline. Despite their locations on America’s periphery, they could be at the centre of national democratic renewal. •

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In the New York Times, columnist Bret Stephens imagined what people in 2025 would make of today’s crisis. The year 2020 would be remembered for the rise of authoritarianism, he thought: “The pandemic provided a ready-made excuse for democratic governments around the world to obstruct opposition parties, ban public assemblies, suppress voting, quarantine cities, close borders, limit trade, strong-arm businesses, impose travel restrictions and censor hostile media outlets in the name of combating ‘false information.’”

Early evidence from around the world gives some support to Stephens’s view. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has sidelined parliament indefinitely and is ruling by decree. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte told the police to shoot people who violate the curfew, and his track record in government suggests he meant it and the police will be only too happy to oblige. In Israel, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not only capitalised on his country’s fear by postponing his own trial, writes Chemi Shalev in Haaretz, but has also “opened Israel’s door to a totalitarian state by deploying the Shin Bet’s formidable surveillance apparatus on Israeli citizens, with no external or parliamentary oversight.” Orbán, Duterte and Netanyahu all seem to have got away with entrenching their positions and silencing dissent. Elsewhere, too, measures that do little to halt the spread of the virus but demonstrate the state’s capacity and willingness to restrict the liberties of some of its citizens — the internment of potential carriers of the virus in a far-flung immigration detention centre, for instance — have met with applause.

Even governments and leaders in countries that have shown few signs of supporting illiberal politicians have suspended constitutionally enshrined freedoms without meeting much resistance. Governments have prohibited church services and football matches, banned demonstrations, declared states of emergency, and imposed curfews and travel restrictions without attracting an outcry. Does this suggest a growing preparedness to submit to authoritarian rule?

Predictions that the coronavirus pandemic will further strengthen authoritarian regimes and erode liberal democracy are also supported by fifteen or so years of evidence of a trend towards authoritarianism and a rise in right-wing populism. In its annual review of human rights in Europe, published last week, Amnesty International notes how “values were changing across Europe,” with the rule of law, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly increasingly under threat in several countries. The report draws attention to the deterioration of human rights in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Romania and Serbia, and is also critical of France, where “the authorities disproportionately restricted the right to freedom of peaceful assembly,” and Germany, where a majority of states “introduced far-reaching new police powers, including extensive surveillance measures.”

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s most recent Democracy Index, democratic practices have been in decline for several years. Each year, the EIU uses five categories of data — electoral process and pluralism; the functioning of government; political participation; political culture; and civil liberties — to calculate a score for each of 167 countries. Last year’s report recorded the lowest average global score since the index was first produced in 2006.

The US-based (and US government–funded) think tank Freedom House found that 2019 was the fourteenth consecutive year of decline in global freedom. According to its most recent Freedom in the World report, “The gap between setbacks and gains widened compared with 2018, as individuals in sixty-four countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties while those in just thirty-seven experienced improvements.”

The methodologies used by Freedom House and the EIU differ, as do some of their country-by-country results, but their overall findings are remarkably similar. The most recent Freedom House and EIU surveys both put Norway at the top of their charts (with Sweden and Finland joint first in Freedom House’s ranking, and Iceland and Sweden coming second and third in the EIU’s), and countries notorious for human rights violations, such as North Korea, Syria and Turkmenistan, at the bottom.

Election outcomes have also been used as evidence of the decline of liberal democracy, and they do show far-right parties increasing their share of the vote. According to the 2019 Timbro Authoritarian Populism Index, populist and extremist parties captured around 10 per cent of the vote in thirty-three European countries in 1993, but that figure has doubled since then. Today, more people are living in countries with authoritarian, autocratic or right-wing populist leaders than twenty — or even ten — years ago. Think of Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States.

In several European countries, respectable centre-right or centre-left parties have invited parties that used to be considered unfit for government to join them in coalition agreements. Norway’s Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party), for example, deemed too extremist just ten years ago, was part of the country’s ruling coalition from 2013 until January this year, when it withdrew in protest at the repatriation from Syria of a Norwegian woman suspected of having supported Islamic State. In Finland, the right-wing populist Finns Party was part of a governing coalition led by Juha Sipilä of the conservative Centre Party from 2015 until 2017. In a recent interview with the German magazine Spiegel, the country’s current prime minister, Sanna Marin of the Social Democrats, who heads a centre-left government, didn’t categorically rule out a future deal with the Finns Party.

To judge whether the current pandemic is likely to hasten the end of liberal democracy and accelerate the rise of populism and authoritarianism, we need to know more about why populist leaders and autocratic regimes have been comparatively successful in recent years. If we knew which factors have contributed to their appeal, we could make a more informed prediction about the likely effects of the coronavirus crisis. It would also be useful to know more about the similarities and differences between, say, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, or between Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Orbán’s Fidesz. Finally, we need to better understand why a country such as Norway was awarded a perfect score for the strength of its liberal democracy despite the fact that the data was collected when the country was governed by a coalition that included the Fremskrittspartiet.

In search for answers to these questions, I turned to four books about populism and/or the far right published in the past twelve months.

Cas Mudde is a Dutch political scientist at the University of Georgia. He has written half a dozen books about populism, racism and right-wing extremism, the latest of which, The Far Right Today, is a very readable introduction to what he calls the “fourth wave of the postwar far right.”

According to Mudde, this wave began at the turn of the century and followed three earlier waves: neo-fascism (1945–55), right-wing populism (1955–80) and the radical right (1980–2000). For Mudde, people on the far right believe that “inequalities between people are natural and positive” and are hostile to liberal democracy. He distinguishes between the extreme right, which rejects democracy, and the radical right, which “accepts the essence of democracy, but opposes fundamental elements of liberal democracy, most notably minority rights, rule of law, and separation of powers.” While both variants of the far right are nativist and authoritarian, only the radical right can be, and often is, populist.

Mudde aims to highlight the main characteristics of the far right over the past twenty years. That’s a big ask because one of its features is heterogeneity. “The far right is plural rather than singular,” Mudde writes. “[E]ven within the most relevant subcategory of the far right, that is, populist radical right parties, differences are at least as pronounced as similarities.” And even in countries that are structurally similar, far-right movements and parties differ enormously in terms of ideology, organisation and strength.

The far right has grown over the past twenty years to the point that it has become mainstream, says Mudde. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the radical right and the mainstream right, and coalitions between radical-right parties and mainstream parties have become routine. He also observes that the leaders of far-right parties — once exclusively white men — increasingly resemble those of mainstream parties. He cites the example of Alice Weidel, the parliamentary co-leader of the Alternative for Germany: “female and lesbian, she worked for Goldman Sachs and speaks Mandarin, and lives partly abroad (in Switzerland) with her non-white partner.” The far right’s supporters, however, are still overwhelmingly white and male.

The far right’s support, Mudde says, is fuelled more by sociocultural than socioeconomic anxieties, although it is not always easy to separate the two: “It is the sociocultural translation of socioeconomic issues that explains most support for far-right policies.” The issues that have energised the far right more than any other are immigration and integration, but he doesn’t hold the “refugee crisis” responsible for its mainstreaming. Its ultimate goal is a monocultural ethnocracy — a nominally democratic regime in which citizenship is based on ethnicity. But far-right groups are also obsessed with security (typically blaming migrants for insecurity) and corruption.

Mainstreaming and normalisation should not be confused with domestication. Mudde argues that we have been witnessing a radicalisation of the mainstream. This is also true in organisational terms: some of the most successful far-right parties in Europe — the Freedom Party in Austria, PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary — were previously mainstream conservative parties. At the same time, mainstream parties have adopted positions that were previously the preserve of the far right, with the Republicans in the United States being a case in point. In countries whose electoral systems favour coalition governments, the populist radical right has become the most logical partner for mainstream right-wing parties because of its ideological fit.

“In fact,” Mudde writes, “over recent decades, the populist radical right has barely moderated, not even when in government. Instead, mainstream parties have radicalised, moving further towards the (populist radical) right in terms of, first and foremost, immigration and integration, but also law and order, European integration (or international collaboration more generally), and populism.” The far right is increasingly able to set the agenda. In that, it has been helped by elements of the mainstream media.

The picture painted by Mudde is bleak. His book doesn’t provide grounds for optimism about how the world will look when the current crisis is behind us. But he has some practical suggestions: the defenders of liberal democracy ought to fight for it (rather than merely against the far right), they ought to reclaim the political agenda, and they “should set clear limits to what collaborations and positions are consistent with liberal democratic values.” I suspect Mudde would not consider Norway between 2013 and 2019, or Finland between 2015 and 2017 to be exemplary success stories

The main value of Mudde’s book is its broad sweep — but given the heterogeneity of the phenomenon that he describes, this is probably also one of its weaknesses. A more important drawback is Mudde’s unwillingness to dig deeper. I take his point that the far right is successful because its agenda has been adopted by previously moderate conservatives. But that raises the question of why nativism and authoritarianism are more attractive now than they were twenty years ago — including to previously moderate conservatives. For it’s hard to believe that the radicalisation of mainstream parties is largely the result of tactical positioning.

Pippa Norris teaches politics at Harvard University and is professor of government at the University of Sydney. Her co-author, Ronald Inglehart, is a political scientist at the University of Michigan. Their book Cultural Backlash, while a hefty 554 pages, puts forward a comparatively simple argument: over the past few decades, largely because of changing values between generations but also because of the expansion of tertiary education and increasing urbanisation, high-income Western societies have moved “in a more socially liberal direction.” As cultural change reached a tipping point, an “authoritarian reflex” was triggered, and social conservatives began supporting populist authoritarian parties and political leaders. Here is a summary of their argument about Trump’s America:

We argue that a tipping point has been reached in the gradual erosion of the socially conservative hegemony of traditional values in America. This has triggered a negative authoritarian counterreaction among moral conservatives threatened by these cultural shifts — a backlash that has been especially powerful in mobilising older generations of white men in rural communities.

Norris and Inglehart write about long-term cultural change as if it has occurred naturally. They also depict the “authoritarian reflex” as almost inevitable: “Newton’s third law of motion holds that ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,’” they write. While conceding that “societal changes are more complicated than physical ones,” they nevertheless claim that these changes “can reach a tipping point that brings an analogous response.” Their evidence suggests that “birth cohort effects” play an important role in societal change. But I am sceptical about applying Newton’s law to sociocultural dynamics. What about the human capacity for adaptation and value change?

Norris and Inglehart argue that the minority position of social conservatives doesn’t act as a brake on their influence during the tipping point phase because they are much more likely to vote than young and generally less conservative people.

Unlike Mudde, who treats populism as a common feature of the radical right, Norris and Inglehart argue that political parties can be classified along three axes: authoritarian–libertarian, populist–pluralist, and (economic) left–(economic) right. In doing so, they recognise that the rise of populism in Western democracies manifested itself also in the emergence of powerful left-wing and/or libertarian populist parties and movements, such as Podemos in Spain, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and Syriza in Greece, and that authoritarian values (security, conformity and obedience) shouldn’t be conflated with the values promoted by the (economic) right. In their view, however, populism in itself can also cause damage: it “tends to undermine the legitimacy of democratic checks on executive powers, opening the door for soft authoritarian leaders.”

Their analysis focuses on the attraction of parties that offer both populism and authoritarianism, “a dangerous combination fuelling a cult of fear.” They argue that authoritarianism arose more from cultural backlash than economic grievance, whereas those who perceive economic disadvantages (without necessarily experiencing them objectively) tend to be particularly attracted to populism. Overall, however, and much like Mudde, they agree that the terrain on which today’s key battlelines are drawn is culture rather than the economy. That claim is supported, for example, by a survey of thirteen democracies showing that since 1984, non-economic issues have become more prominent than economic issues in party programs.

Norris and Inglehart’s analysis is informed by large-scale longitudinal datasets about attitudes and values, voting behaviour and social change. As often happens in this kind of data-driven research, the figures also set limits for their analysis. The abundance of data about electoral behaviour means their litmus test for the strength of authoritarianism is the performance of authoritarian parties at the elections. They have comparatively little to say about people who hold authoritarian values long before a political party advocating these values enters the scene.

Norris and Inglehart are not as pessimistic as Mudde. While concluding that “it remains to be seen how resilient liberal democracy will be in Western societies, or whether it will be damaged irreparably by authoritarian populist forces,” they also seem to believe that the “advance of liberal values” will resume after the “tipping point era.”

Where Mudde believes that by trying to steal the far right’s thunder, mainstream parties are normalising authoritarian positions, Norris and Inglehart take a very different position. They claim that governing elites in countries such as Norway and Sweden “may have undermined confidence in democratic institutions” by not responding to “genuine public concerns” about refugees and asylum seekers, and that it is possible to squeeze out authoritarian-populist parties “by adopting immigration policies that are more restrictive” and using “nationalistic language.” In fact, they seem to validate the far right’s criticism of policies and programs for asylum seekers and refugees by demanding that they “need to be carefully calibrated to avoid cultural backlash and accusations of ‘queue jumping.’”

I don’t doubt that it is possible to sideline authoritarian-populist parties (as happened last year in Denmark, for example) or prevent them from playing a major role in the first place (as has happened in Australia, among other countries). But this often comes at the high price of the radicalisation of mainstream parties. The rankings in the EIU and Freedom House reports make me wonder whether this radicalisation is always properly accounted for — particularly in cases where it does not affect the functioning of government, citizens’ political participation, civil liberties and the electoral process, and where authoritarian values play out in relation to non-citizens, particularly those seeking asylum.

Norris and Inglehart ask the question that Mudde sidesteps: why has there been a recent trend towards authoritarian populism in Europe and the United States? I am, as they are, convinced that those who flock to authoritarian parties and leaders often do so because they feel threatened by society’s liberalisation, rather than because they are the victims of economic globalisation or because they feel threatened by migrants. But I am afraid that Norris and Inglehart’s focus on parties and votes is too narrow, and that they are telling only part of the story.

Mudde provides a very accessible account of a phenomenon that can be observed around the world. Norris and Ingleheart’s book is more narrowly focused — but within that focus the authors furnish a comprehensive analysis that is rich in detail. Overall their book is less readable than Mudde’s because they keep repeating their main thesis, and overload the text with statistical information (much of which could have been relegated to the appendix). Given the insights they are offering, the text’s unwieldiness is a great shame.

Walden Bello is a Filipino political activist, eminent sociologist and former member of parliament who was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in 2003 for his efforts “in educating civil society about the effects of corporate globalisation.”

Bello’s book differs in three important respects from the two I’ve discussed so far. First, his analysis doesn’t focus on European and North American democracies. In fact, of his case studies, only one, about Italy, is European; the others deal with Chile, Indonesia, India, Brazil and Thailand. But not even Bello’s Italy is part of the global North as we know it, because he is writing about the rise of fascism in the Italy of the 1920s. That points to the second difference: Bello adopts a broader, historical approach spanning the past century. Finally, he doesn’t focus on electoral patterns and doesn’t rely on survey results; rather, in Marxian fashion, he focuses on class struggles and the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution.

For Bello, “movements of the extreme right, authoritarian right, and fascism are variants of counterrevolution.” Thus, Benito Mussolini in 1920s Italy and Augusto Pinochet in 1973 in Chile led counterrevolutionary movements — against reform socialism in Italy, and against the Allende government in Chile, respectively. Only the fascism of Rodrigo Duterte, he says, has not been counterrevolutionary.

Although I’m not convinced by Bello’s argument that Marx’s 1851 text, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, can guide our analysis of authoritarian populism today (or of Pinochet’s and Mussolini’s regimes), Counterrevolution does offer useful insights and, in some respects, can serve as a corrective to the books reviewed above. I mention only two insights here: Bello emphasises the role played by charismatic leaders, and draws attention to the fact that today’s far right is often using a critique of neoliberalism and globalisation first formulated by the radical left.

As authoritarianism increased its appeal, Theodor Adorno’s writings about the social psychology of fascism were rediscovered. Last year, Verso republished the path-breaking study The Authoritarian Personality, the result of a large research project led by Adorno in the United States during the 1940s that tried to explain the rise of fascism. Also last year, a transcript of a lecture about the extreme right, delivered by Adorno at the University of Vienna in April 1967 at the invitation of the Socialist Students of Austria, was published for the first time in German. The English translation will be available later this month.

In Germany, the year 1967 is best remembered for an anti-authoritarian revolt. Two months after Adorno’s talk, Benno Ohnesorg, one of the students protesting against the Berlin visit of the Shah of Iran, was shot dead by the police; the ensuing demonstrations marked the beginning of the student rebellion in Germany. It is less well known that 1967 also saw the resurgence of the German far right. In November 1966, the National Democratic Party of Germany, which had been founded only two years earlier, won more than 7 per cent of the vote at state elections in Hesse and Bavaria. The following year, shortly after Adorno’s Vienna lecture, it was successful at three more state elections.

I bought my copy of Adorno’s published lecture at a newsagency at a train station in a medium-sized German town, which is perhaps as good an indication as any of its reach. The interest that it has generated in Germany has a lot to do with the fact that Adorno’s reflections can be read as an original and perceptive commentary on the authoritarian-populist Alternative for Germany, which has been represented in federal parliament since 2017.

Adorno writes about the National Democratic Party’s campaign against intellectuals and established political parties and about its anti-Americanism, its claim to represent the true democrats, its attempt to monopolise the attribute “German,” its gesturing towards issues that must not be named, and its practice of making up stories and representing them as facts. He observes that the mobilisation of support for the far right appeals to a yearning for catastrophe, reminding us how little will be gained if we assume voters and followers of authoritarian populism make only rational choices when succumbing to the appeal of the Trumps and Orbáns and Bolsonaros.

Adorno observed that the approach of the German far right was characterised by a unique constellation of rational means and irrational ends. He found that the far right’s propaganda, much like the Nazis’ propaganda, was not a means to transport a message but was actually the substance of their politics. Adorno’s attention to propaganda is particularly noteworthy. He would have had much to say about social media’s impact on the rise of the populist far right — which surprisingly rates hardly a mention in the other three books.

Of the four books reviewed here, the one that was never intended for publication is perhaps the most interesting.

Well before we all became obsessed with a virus, two of the authors reviewed here likened authoritarianism to a contagious disease. Adorno suggested that the masses needed to be inoculated against the tricks employed by the far right, and that these tricks needed to be uncovered and named. I don’t share his optimism about the efficacy of such inoculation, but it’s certainly worth a try.

“Perhaps my stance can best be compared to that of the virologist,” writes Bello, “who is engrossed in the study of an exotic but deadly virus for scientific reasons and to make a contribution to the development of a vaccine against it.” He does not offer such a vaccine in his book, but at least he recognises the key role of contestation. While I don’t have much time for the use of physical laws in the social sciences, I am surprised that Mudde, Norris and Inglehart pay no attention to the opposition that has often been energised by the successes of far-right politicians. Whether authoritarian populists succeed will also depend on the strength of the counter-movements they trigger. Focusing on the rise of the populist far right without taking into account those movements unduly favours pessimism.

I would like to suggest that in order to come to grips with the phenomenon of authoritarian populism, neither Mudde’s overview, nor Norris and Inglehart’s number crunching, nor Bello’s class analysis gets us particularly far on its own. What is probably also needed is a combination of the kind of study carried out by Adorno and his collaborators in the 1940s, and ethnographic analyses that help us understand how and why individuals and communities subscribe to authoritarian values.

While the four books nevertheless help us to understand key aspects of the phenomenon of contemporary authoritarian populism, they don’t enable us to predict the post-coronavirus future. Contrary to the impression I gave at the beginning of this article, the evidence is messy. So far, the coronavirus crisis has harmed as well as benefited autocratic and populist leaders. That’s because some of them — including Erdoğan, Trump, Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson — initially failed to take the threat seriously. While some, including Orbán and Duterte, seized the opportunity to shore up their position, others who we might have expected to use the virus as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency and ruling by decree have been surprisingly reluctant to do so. They include, most importantly, Donald Trump, who has threatened to suspend Congress but so far done little more than use the crisis as an excuse for daily campaign events camouflaged as press briefings. That 2020 will be remembered for the rise of authoritarianism is by no means a foregone conclusion.

Should we really be most concerned now about the question of whether liberal democracy in the global North emerges weakened or strengthened out of the current crisis? That we can is a sign of our privilege. And it’s an indication of our (global Northern) egotism that in our newspapers we read much these days about the future of liberal democracy, and little about how the coronavirus might affect the global South.

Or maybe we shouldn’t ask “what will liberal democracy look like after the end of the world as we know it?” in the first place. “Perhaps some of you will now ask me… what do I think about the future of the far right?” Adorno said at the end of his Vienna lecture:

I think this question is wrong, because it is too contemplative. This way of thinking, which assumes that such things ought to be viewed as if they were natural catastrophes, like cyclones… that are subject to forecasts, implies a kind of resignation, whereby one removes oneself as a political subject. It implies a spectator’s relationship to reality. How these things will develop, and the responsibility for how they develop, that’s eventually up to us.

Oh, and by the way, the full title of R.E.M.’s 1987 song is: “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” •

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The danger for Wuhan is that it will come to be known simply as the virus city. While Covid-19 has somewhat offensively been referred to internationally as the “China virus” or “Chinese virus,” in China it is popularly known as the Wuhan virus, or Wuhan pneumonia. The year of the rat, complain Wuhanese, has left them feeling like the “rats crossing the road” (guojie laoshu). Other Chinese are avoiding them like the plague.

It doesn’t take an epidemic to bring out regional prejudices in China. Wuhan’s detractors — and there are quite a few of them — regard it as a dirty and unattractive place where people swear a lot. Spend a bit of time in Hangzhou, says one émigré, and you’ll realise that the educational level in Wuhan is rather low. Not so, say the city’s champions. People in Wuhan might be a bit rough and ready, but they are open to the outside world, adaptable, tolerant and resilient.

Like jokes about the Englishman, the Scot and the Irishman, there are variations for virtually every other place in China. But the virus has given a nasty edge to criticism of the Wuhanese. One person jokes about throwing out his “Wuhan duck necks,” a local delicacy, and another about giving up his recently acquired Wuhan girlfriend. Wuhan novelist Ai Jingjing, plainly affronted by the charge that the city’s eating habits caused the outbreak, felt impelled to go online to explain to the rest of China what people in Wuhan actually do like to eat: fish, rice and lotus root.

Along with the jokes and abuse has come ostracism. On 27 January, sixteen people from Wuhan narrowly avoided being stranded in Japan after seventy Shanghainese refused to travel on the same plane. “Are we compatriots or what?” asked a furious victim. It took the intervention of consular staff to end the stand-off.

Wuhan isn’t like Beijing or Shanghai. Despite its size, its pivotal position in central China and its many universities, it doesn’t have an identifiable reputation that might help it overcome negative associations. This is partly because its rich history, the natural source of cultural standing, is split among its component parts: Wuchang, Hanyang and Hankou. Divided from each other by the Yangtze and Han rivers, these were formerly distinct cities, and local identity is still marked. “I’m from Hankou,” says a Wuhan student to a visitor. “I’ve just come to Wuchang to attend university.”

As a great port and market town for centuries, Hankou, or Hankow in an older spelling, is the most recognisable of the three place names. Neighbouring Hanyang, once the seat of government for Hankou, is now the poor cousin. Across the Yangtze River, Wuchang, long the provincial capital of Hubei and its cultural centre, has great historical significance. It was the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 that sparked the revolution that led to the founding of the Republic of China, Asia’s first republic, in 1912.

Wuhan’s constituent settlements — Hankow (now known as Hankou), Hanyang and Wuchang — probably in the 1920s. From the 1924 edition of the Japanese Government Railways Guide to China. Antiqua Print Gallery/Alamy

This history could have been leveraged to greater advantage for Wuhan as a whole, but China’s ruling Communist Party prefers history to be about another revolution — the one that culminated in the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Wuchang does have a museum to the 1911 revolution, but the story of that first republic is tightly controlled on the mainland. For an insight as to why, you need only look at Taiwan, a largely unrecognised state that is steadily resisting incorporation into the People’s Republic and still formally bears the title of “Republic of China.”

A rather rocky administrative history brought Wuchang, Hanyang and Hankou together as Wuhan under the Nationalists in the 1920s, and then again under the Communists. The histories connected with the name of this larger entity are also difficult ones. In 1927 Wuhan was the site of a purge of communists from the left-wing government formed in the city during the Nationalist Revolution. In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, it was the site of armed conflict that left more a thousand dead. That clash — the Wuhan Incident, as it came to be known — was condemned at the time as counterrevolutionary, but when the verdict was reversed after Mao’s death it didn’t do much for a subdued Wuhan. Like much of the Cultural Revolution, the Wuhan Incident is passed over in silence, or at best smoothed over.

These histories of violent struggle are somehow consistent with the popular characterisation of Wuhanese as fierce and aggressive. But Wuhan has had its place in the sun, and in a less controlled ideological environment that would be celebrated. Between January and October 1938, following the infamous siege of Nanjing by the Japanese, Wuhan served as the refuge for the Nationalist government and became the provisional capital of China. In these months, writes historian Stephen MacKinnon, “the metropolis blossomed.” Crowded with refugees, on tenterhooks about the Japanese advance, the city came into its own.

“To a degree unmatched in any Chinese capital before or since,” writes McKinnon, “Wuhan enjoyed parliamentary style debate and political experimentation, the flowering of a free press, and the unleashing and redirection of enormous creative energies in cultural spheres.”

MacKinnon’s book, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley, 2008), has been translated into Chinese and published by Wuhan Press. As the present epidemic runs its course, Wuhan people might care to read it, and remember the ten months when their city symbolised to the entire country unity and courage in the face of apparently insuperable odds. •

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And the situation seems to be getting worse. Surveys by the Scanlon Foundation and the Democracy 2025 project — a collaboration between the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis and the Museum of Australian Democracy — show steep falls in political trust. So does the longest-running, best-known and most influential large-scale survey, the Australian Election Study, or AES, which began in 1987.

The AES’s much-publicised overview report, Trends in Australian Political Opinion, released in late 2016, compares results for 152 survey questions asked over three decades or more, using both its own data and findings from surveys conducted by political scientist Don Aitkin in 1967, 1969 and 1979. Of the graphs in the report, two have propelled the “trust crisis” narrative like no others. In one, 40 per cent of survey respondents say they are “not satisfied with democracy”; in the other, just 26 per cent agree that “people in government can be trusted.” The Sydney Morning Herald’s headline — “The Fundamental Operating Model of Australian Politics Is Breaking Down” — was typical of the media’s response to these findings.

But that headline made me wonder why, if political trust is so low, Australia isn’t on the verge of revolution. The AES findings suggest a real feeling of anger with politics, politicians and political institutions, yet they don’t seem to fit with day-to-day reality. Curious, I started looking more closely at opinions expressed about politicians and democracy in mainstream newspapers.

Here, too, the evidence wasn’t reassuring. According to people who write letters to the editor, politicians “always think of themselves” and invariably break their promises. They are “loud-mouthed careerists” with nothing to offer but “words, words, words.” And, of course, they’re “out of touch” with the concerns of the average citizen.

Running parallel were complaints aimed at voters by editors, academics and MPs themselves. An editorial criticised Australian voters because they “don’t know one candidate from another” and are mostly “apathetic” about politics in general. Certain ex-politicians and academics viewed voters as self-interested, disengaged political novices who, through “a system of crooked bargaining,” sell their votes to the highest bidder. It’s a discouraging scene.

But I should come clean here. Every quote in those last two paragraphs, along with the quote at the top of this article, appeared in Australian regional and city newspapers and magazines in the early 1920s, the 1930s or the late 1940s — periods of social instability, political unrest, economic recession and even war. Yet they seem curiously familiar.

Jump forward a generation, to the late 1960s and early 1970s, and public trust in politics seems to have been even lower. “Australians are fed up with politics,” reported the Australian in April 1974, adding that widespread disillusionment with elections was part of “a general malaise.” According to one young would-be MP, “The Australian government ignores public opinion… it ignores voters… this country is run on every level by men who regard people as puppets, nothing more.”

Some young Australians were so disgruntled they formed a “people’s parliament” where “all the people ignored and neglected by the [government]… will have a chance to say their piece.” Compare this to young Australians today, who, according to one interpretation of the AES’s data, “display a greater willingness to flirt with authoritarianism.” These are not exactly the “revolutionaries” that some of their parents were.

I’m not the first to point this out. In 2013, worried that the “trust crisis” narrative was dominating academic and public debate, historian Jackie Dickenson wrote Trust Me: Australians and Their Politicians, from where many of the quotes above are drawn. Her intention was to “challenge the assumption that political trust today is at an all-time low,” because an unquestioning acceptance of that belief “feeds cynicism and apathy, and threatens the engagement of voters in politics.”

Dickenson’s work is part of a growing literature critical of the accuracy and consequences of the public attitude surveys that journalist draw on when they’re writing about trust. In a critique published thirty-one years ago, social scientist Diego Gambetta argued that “trust” — just like “freedom,” “knowledge” and “justice” — is an “elusive” concept with no fixed meaning. More recently, another scholar, Guido Möllering, identified “three perspectives” on trust, all of which contain further different ways of understanding the concept.

If “trust” can mean various things to one person, how can we be sure that social scientists are measuring the same idea when they survey 2000 respondents? And if we can’t be sure about definitions, how likely is it that surveys are assembling coherent sets of data? Yet the findings are rarely accompanied by caveats like these, so news of the crisis spreads unimpeded via the media and think-tanks through the public sphere.

Epistemological challenges aside, more straightforward problems are created when data are matched up from different sources. The two AES graphs I mentioned above are good examples: they draw on Don Aitkin’s 1969 and 1979 surveys, which were conducted as one-on-one interviews, and on AES data, which was gathered using paper questionnaires.

On the first theme covered by these graphs, Aitkin’s 1969 and 1979 surveys asked, “On the whole, how do you feel about the state of government and politics in Australia?” and provided four permissible answers: “very satisfied,” “fairly satisfied,” “not satisfied” and “don’t know.” The AES’s question, which it began asking in 1996, was significantly different: “On the whole, are you satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied or not at all satisfied with the way democracy works in Australia?”

Despite these differences, the AES’s 2016 report combines the two sets of data — its own and Aitkin’s — into a single graph under the headline, “Satisfaction with Democracy,” charting “yes” and “no” responses from 1969 to 2016. But Aitkin’s question didn’t make any reference to “democracy,” and included the word “feel,” which may have subtly influenced the way people answered. The differences between Aitkin’s question and the AES’s are referred to only in the endnotes to the report.

The AES’s “Trust in Government” graph also uses Aitkin’s 1969 and 1979 surveys as its starting point. Aitkin’s original question, “In general, do you feel that the people in government are too often interested in looking after themselves, or do you feel that they can be trusted to do the right thing nearly all the time?” had three possible answers: “Can be trusted,” “Look after themselves” and “Don’t know.” In 1993 the AES began asking a modified version of Aitkin’s question, “In general, do you feel that the people in government are too often interested in looking after themselves, or do you feel that they can be trusted to do the right thing nearly all the time?” with four possible answers: “Usually look after themselves,” “Sometimes look after themselves,” “Sometimes can be trusted to do the right thing” and “Usually can be trusted to do the right thing.” Again, the differences create obvious continuity problems, and once more a short explanation in the report’s notes doesn’t seem adequate.

Who can truthfully claim that one person’s feeling of satisfaction about “government and politics” is the same as another person’s professed support for “democracy”? It’s hard enough to identify a shared definition of what democracy means today, let alone confidently claim that 2000 respondents had the same “democracy” in mind when they were asked about government and politics fifty years ago.

All this suggests that the “trust crisis” narrative might be at least partly due to how the results of public attitude surveys have been presented. That reporting may then create a feedback loop: after years of hearing the crisis mentioned by media reports based on values surveys, individuals are likely to be more suspicious of politics in all its forms, and answer surveys accordingly.

Don Aitkin was aware of the importance of putting his findings in a proper historical context. In his highly regarded book Stability and Change in Australian Politics (1982), which compares his 1969 and 1979 surveys, he is at pains to explain that “survey evidence would have had little meaning without the prior work of many historians, political scientists and sociologists.” Aitkin knew that survey work required more than simply acquiring data and presenting it to the world.

Public expectations can be shaped by seemingly factual information about the state of politics repeated over and over by the media — just as the Coalition’s recent victory was only a surprise because of public expectations created by polls predicting a solid Labor win. Pollsters around the country have had their profession tarnished by methodological errors and a failure to make clear the limitations of their findings. Indeed, two of Australia’s leading news outlets, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, have decided to stop reporting polls for the foreseeable future.

The real value of surveys like the AES risks being undermined by the fact that they are often treated as the only way of gathering useful information about contemporary public attitudes. An overreliance on any single theory, analytical method or data-gathering technique only impoverishes the social sciences.

Perhaps with these concerns in mind, Democracy 2025’s first report, published in 2018, combined online questionnaires with twenty focus groups to measure public attitudes, and also explained its methods of analysis in detail. But its analysis, too, has led to alarmist headlines including “Australians No Longer Trust Their Democracy,” again highlighting the importance of historical contextualisation.

A final word on public trust in politics. We rarely acknowledge that liberal democracy requires a certain degree of distrust. Too much is a bad thing, of course, but we’re not at crisis point yet. Perhaps trust in politics is fluctuating as it always does, and is at a low ebb because of recent turbulence? If history is any guide, Australians will eventually return to merely disliking their politicians. We can only hope the “trust crisis” narrative has not diminished or fundamentally damaged the chances of this correction taking place. •

The post Which crisis of trust? appeared first on Inside Story.

Meanwhile, as Europe is transfixed by the Brexit conundrum, political cataclysms roll on among its member states. The latest one came just last week in the Netherlands, when Thierry Baudet, a political dandy with a PhD, and his self-styled Forum for Democracy emerged out of nowhere to seize 20 per cent of Senate seats and deprive the ruling four-party centre-right coalition of its upper house majority. Baudet is no run-of-the-mill Dutch politician. Here’s a fragment of his victory speech:

Here we are, this evening, literally at the eleventh hour, amidst the ruins of what was once the greatest civilisation the world has ever known. A civilisation that extended to the ends of the earth. A civilisation full of self-confidence… Our nation is part of the family tree of the civilisation. But just like all those other countries of our Borean world we are being destroyed by the very people who are supposed to protect us. We are being undermined by our universities, our journalists, by the people who receive our arts funding and who design our buildings. Most of all, we are being undermined by those who govern. A clique of air-headed networkers, professional talkfesters, people who have never read a book in their entire life, and who have no idea of what the important long-term issues facing us really are. They unfortunately dominate the decision-making bodies of this country and in a bizarre mix of incompetence and cynical self-interest, again and again they make the wrong choices. But not for long.

Pompous stuff, certainly. Somewhat scary, too, especially for those who grasped the speech’s dog-whistle signposts, such as the reference to the “Borean” world, a term used by racial ideologues to refer to Aryan Nordic race purity. But what happened next was at least as disturbing.

To set some context: Holland has had flamboyant anti-establishment politicians before. When the last one, Pim Fortuyn, another PhD-holder (a one-time professor even), questioned certain elements of Islam, he was, in his own words, “demonised” by much of the left and by the mainstream media. He was assassinated in 2002, just before he was slated to win the Dutch election by a landslide and probably become prime minister, by a radicalised environmental activist who considered him a danger to society. Two years later, one of his key sympathisers, filmmaker, columnist and harsh political satirist Theo van Gogh, was assassinated too, stabbed by a radicalised young lone-wolf Muslim. And then there was Geert Wilders, who took the anti-Islam stance to the next level, became a powerful player in Dutch politics, and has lived under heavy police protection for fifteen years.

One would hope that some national democratic self-examination would have taken place during those fifteen years — that ways would have been found to reset the tone of the national conversation about these deeply contentious issues and dispense with the violence that had blackened it. Not quite: Baudet finds it useful to explore the rhetorical registers of fascism. At least, as we shall see, that’s how Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, would classify what he’s doing. And just days after Baudet’s post-election speech, ultra-left activists marched the streets and, captured live on TV, called for his assassination. And so the cycle of mutual vilification and polarisation was fed.

In neither Australia nor Holland was there a Jacinda Ardern to exert the kind of authentic and authoritative leadership that brings everyone to their senses and appeals to the better angels of their nature. Instead, we had choruses of shrill voices talking past each other on talk shows, in the papers and online. And this was happening in two of the most prosperous countries and stable democracies on earth.

What the hell is going on?

Well, one thing going on is that “-isms” are back in the political fabric of democracies. Three in particular are on many lips: nationalism, populism and fascism. Illustrations of their return can be found in the exploits and political style of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński’s in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s in Turkey, Narendra Modi’s in India, Jair Bolsonaro’s in Brazil, and Rodrigo Duterte’s in the Philippines. Never mind the mass appeal and political endurance of the Le Pens’ Front National, and of Nigel Farage’s and now Gerard Batten’s UKIP, or the Sweden Democrats’ successes, or the Danish People’s Party’s hold on successive Danish governments.

The list is growing. Debate about their significance is heated. Questions and controversies abound. Are these -isms — each of which has inflicted tragedy and trauma across twentieth-century Europe — really on the march again? How different in agenda and style are they from their previous incarnations? How do they map onto the left–right and progressive–conservative continuums that have long formed the basis of party landscapes? What fuels their new momentum? And most of all: do they pose a threat to democratic values, institutions and practices?

For those whose political consciousness was formed after the fall of communism, this must seem a curious turn of events. For those who lived through or experienced the impact of political regimes rooted in the twentieth century’s big -isms it may well be outright alarming. But we would not be talking about it so much if there were not many, many people for whom these “new,” out of the box, anti-establishment parties, movements and leaders offer an appealing alternative to what they consider the “unrepresentative swill” (to borrow a Keatingism) that monopolises the liberal democratic institutions that triumphed, we were told, in 1989.

There is much political space today for figures who seek to persuade people that those same liberal institutions have allowed globalisation and market forces to wreak havoc on what are the very foundations of democratic sensibilities: a striving for economic equality, political moderation and respect for minorities; a willingness to accept that compromise is part and parcel of collective decision-making; and a system of government that is felt to be tangible and proximate and is widely experienced as operating fairly and accountably.

Deregulation, marketisation and the internationalisation of public policy and service delivery have not, by and large, delivered on their promise. While they may have contributed to economic growth, they have also brought about the biggest economic collapse since the 1930s. They have allowed new ideologies of flexibility and innovation to strip employees of taken-for-granted social rights and economic certainties, and have led them into a world full of job insecurity and existential fear. They have turned citizens into customers without paying much heed to the reality that many citizens are both ill-equipped and unwilling to follow the script of “competition” and “choice.” They have helped catalyse deep and rapid technological change in all walks of life without buffering the impact of this “creative destruction.” And they have made the business of governing seem more rather than less opaque and disempowering.

These are inconvenient realities that the ruling classes have not wished to contemplate — at least until the sometimes rough-and-tumble new clusters of “-ist” political activists started to leverage the internet to make inroads into public consciousness and, eventually, into political institutions themselves. This is where committed democrats stand today, not knowing what to think or how to act. Confusion, shock, fear, outrage, vilification: seldom in the last half century were the public emotions in democratic societies so strongly, and mostly negatively, aroused.

Against this backdrop, how much change — and how much of the sense of loss that inevitably accompanies it — can the liberal democratic system of government absorb while retaining its fundamental authenticity and viability? Cambridge political theorist and commentator David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends, is sanguine: he argues that democracy is so firmly established in many of our societies that it is hard to shake. He likens what is happening to a “midlife crisis” rather than the beginning of the end. It is a refreshing diagnosis amid a plethora of doom-laden books, articles and op-eds.

Runciman doesn’t go along the usual route of showing how voters are adrift, how money has taken over politics, how the internet is creating echo chambers, or how globalisation has created new proletarians who hate its casual cosmopolitanism. He particularly takes issue with what he sees as our tendency to use misplaced historical analogies: “Our political imaginations are stuck with outdated images of what democratic failure looks like. We are trapped in the landscape of the twentieth century.”

For Runciman, the real question for stable democracies is this: “how long we can persist with institutional arrangements we have grown so used to trusting, that we no longer notice when they have ceased to work.” With his usual flair for coining powerful phrases, he says that “democracy could fail while remaining intact.” He doesn’t want to diminish the present sense of crisis, but he suggests it pulls us in opposite directions: we wish for something better than the hollowed-out party and parliamentary politics of the twentieth century, but are pulled back by our reluctance to let go of something that has got us this far.

The bulk of How Democracy Ends is devoted to examining what makes the current crisis of democracy different from its predecessors. The most obvious place to look is at our technologies and the new power structures and manipulative possibilities they bring. Dave Eggers’s dystopian novel about social media, The Circle, gets an elaborate mention, but the Cambridge Analytica saga is breezily dismissed as a sideshow. We learn that killer robots won’t be here anytime soon and so we shouldn’t obsess about them. The digital revolution may have overpromised and underdelivered, yet it retains “practically limitless” transformative potential. But it is not about to kill our democracies.

Runciman also finds that political violence and (the threat of) coups play nowhere near the wrecking roles they played in Europe before the second world war. When Trump got elected, we may have all rushed to our bookshelves to re-read Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, but the Trump we’ve seen since then is not as insidious and purposeful a putschist as the main character in that dark and gripping novel (which Runciman confesses to admiring greatly). He characterises Trump instead as “both ludicrous and threatening, familiar and peculiar, inside and outside the bounds of what democracy can tolerate… He is incomprehensible and he is as open as a child. He is a reason to panic and he is a reason to keep calm and carry on.”

In strong democracies like the United States the real danger doesn’t come from a frontal assault, it emanates from the sidelines — namely from the pernicious effects of conspiracy theories, which Runciman sees as forming the heart of the logic of populism. “Our” values have been stolen and compromised by “them” — the manipulative, weak, degenerate elites who pay lip service to democracy while secretly undermining it. He takes us on a grand tour of populist conspiracy politics in Poland, Turkey and India, where it has nestled itself into the philosophy of the governing powers and thus become self-reinforcing.

Runciman is most concerned about democracy’s capacity to absorb the disasters of our age, those emanating from the life-threatening technologies we have created and the interconnectedness of the world we have made. Networks can collapse without warning and without human intent. We can sleepwalk into danger, unduly complacent in the face of such mortal dangers. Or politicians can be hyper-attentive to risks and yet incapable of taking effective action, thus walking a tightrope into disaster. He puts it beautifully:

In the middle of the twentieth century, the death of democracy as a form of politics was the precursor for the possible death of civilisation [as a result of nuclear war]. But in the twenty-first century, it is the other way around. Democracy survives because very little can kill it as a form of politics. The death of civilisation might have to come first.

Jason Stanley would most likely disagree vehemently. The look and feel of How Fascism Works is entirely different. A Yale philosopher whose parents fled Nazism, Stanley has none of Runciman’s calculated Oxbridge-style playfulness. The tone is grave; this is a matter of life and death for democracy — that much is clear from the outset. His main concern is with one cluster of our age’s resurgent -isms: nationalism/fascism. In fact he defines fascism as a label for (ethnic, religious, cultural) “ultra-nationalism with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.”

Stanley’s book is a study of what he calls the fascist style of politics, in particular how it is used as a mechanism for achieving power. Fascism works by separating a population into an “us” and a “them,” dehumanising whoever happens to be included in the “them” category in order to limit “our” capacity for empathy, which ultimately opens the floodgates to barbarism. If ever a twentieth-century mindset has been brought — self-consciously and purposefully — to the study of early twenty-first-century leaders and systems, it is here. In this, the book resembles Timothy Snyder’s widely read and compelling On Tyranny (2017). But where Snyder formulates what-you-should-do lessons for democrats, Stanley presents a how-they-do-it diagnosis of fascists.

In brisk succession, he sets out eight such tactics. They come, I would argue, in two clusters. The first focuses on distorting a community’s capacity to think critically and realistically. This is achieved cumulatively, by creating a mythical past to support a vision for the present; by twisting the language of ideals using propaganda; by promoting anti-intellectualism with attacks on universities and educational systems that foster critical thinking; and by creating a state of unreality in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.

This lays the groundwork for the second group of tactics, which move towards active oppression and repression: naturalising group differences in support of a hierarchy of human worth; cultivating a sense of victimhood among the in-group or dominant population; reifying us-versus-them through a cult of law and order directed at exposing and persecuting the “them”; and distorting male anxieties into fears that they and/or their families are under existential threat from those who reject their structures and traditions.

Leaders loom large in this book. Stanley draws his examples from some of the same countries that figure in Runciman’s book, but their interpretations differ markedly. Stanley finds nothing ludicrous and a lot of fascism in Trump — and in the likes of Steve Bannon or broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, for that matter. Among others, he dissects the rhetoric and tactics of Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Erdoğan and Myanmar’s leaders to illustrate his points. He highlights Hungary and Poland as hitherto thriving liberal democracies (perhaps a somewhat generous characterisation of their anything-but-easy post-1989 trajectories) that such leaders are turning into “vivid examples of the rapid normalisation of fascism.”

I’ve seen some of that up close. In 2017, I was in Warsaw with a group of senior public servants for a two-day visit. On day one, we were received at the Institute of Public Administration, a national training school for public service elites. The director of the school, an amiable former ambassador with a Solidarity past, gave us a polite and guarded assessment of the political changes taking place in his country since the victory of Kaczyński’s national-conservative PiS party. As he talked, I saw his assistant, a young woman who had helped us greatly in arranging our visit, become visibly upset. As we walked towards where we would have lunch she almost fainted. We took her aside and asked her what was the matter. In tears she told us that she had received a text message announcing that this very director would be fired the next day and replaced by a regime-friendly successor.

On the second day, we visited the Polish supreme court. The entire court turned up. Sitting in a stately room speaking gravely in Polish, they told us how the regime’s attack on judicial independence was unfolding. Thinking back on those events after having read Stanley’s book, it now seems like someone had seen an early draft and decided to use it as a script.

In the end, both these books are enlightening in their different ways. They helped me understand what is going on in the two countries with which this essay began, both of which I am a proud and yet more alert and alarmed citizen of. I learned to look differently at people like Anning and Baudet, and at the responses they elicit, and to put into a larger perspective the latest action–reaction response to the controversies they create.

That these two astute political observers, Runciman and Stanley, characterise the times in which we live in such starkly different terms doesn’t mean that one of them must be right and the other utterly wrong. That is precisely the temptation that both authors want us to resist. If democracy is to not just persist but thrive, all of us must remain curious about the political spectacle and comfortable with opposing assessments of what is happening, why it is happening and what might happen next. The juxtaposition of these two gripping accounts of what is eating away at democracy as we know it is a good place to begin exercising that essential muscle. •

The post The return of the -isms appeared first on Inside Story.

In this concluding book, published before the French political establishment was rocked by the rise of the “yellow jackets,” whose rise the book foretells, Rosanvallon doesn’t beat around the bush. He observes that our era has seen a gradual shift of the centre of gravity in democratic societies. For more than two centuries, the central question has been that of representation: who had a say in the choice of representatives in the first place, and how those representatives performed their roles as legislators while remaining responsive to those who elected them. More recently, the most pressing question has increasingly been the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed.

The great historical battles for democracy centred on the legislature. The new battles centre on the executive, which Rosanvallon argues has eclipsed the former as the most important institution in contemporary democracy. In forms and rituals, the “parliamentary-representative model” with which the democratic era began still exists, but we have effectively entered the “presidential–governing” era, in which the main battleground and source of citizen concern is not about being poorly represented but about being poorly governed.

Although Rosanvallon centres his argument on the presidential democracies whose numbers have swollen in these post-colonial and post-1989 times, much of what he has to say applies just as well to parliamentary systems like Australia’s. Whether parliamentary or presidential in their institutional design, all contemporary democracies have been experiencing the game-changing influence of the same macrotrends: the growing size and influence of the executive branch, the decline of political parties as funnels for authoritative representation, and the personalisation of politics that has filled the resulting vacuum. Combined, these trends have produced a bizarre situation in which ever more frantic promise-making and permanent campaigning has sprung up that at the same time as the legislative branch has effectively become a sideshow. As Rosanvallon bluntly states, parliaments have become “effectively subordinate to the business of governing.”

This being the case, a crucial requirement for “good democratic government” becomes not so much rolling back the pathologies of contemporary electoral and parliamentary politics but ensuring that society is still able to exert some measure of control over the executive. The chief purpose of this book is to describe the mechanisms of vigilance and oversight under which popular oversight of executive power is continuous and effective. This system of “permanent democracy,” as Rosanvallon calls it, should be built on the ashes of what was once our “democracy of authorisation,” which centred on competitive elections between socially rooted parties with distinct ideological and programmatic profiles and the presumed primacy of the legislature in the fabric of democratic government.

But the institutional realities of government have shifted. The sociological foundations on which the democracy of authorisation thrived have largely been eroded away, hollowing out its potential to deliver stable, effective and legitimate government. The frenzied circus of personalised compaigning either produces voter disenchantment once the messy business of governing commences, or legitimates a slide into leader-centric, populist authorianism. (Rosanvallon discusses several versions of the latter under colourful and such thoroughly European labels as Caesarism and Bonapartism). What this model simply does not provide is an institutional repertoire to exert indicative and corrective popular oversight when the business of governing unfolds following the electoral moment.

What would Rosanvallon’s “permanent democracy” look like? Given his focus on the need to keep executive power in check rather than produce smart and legitimate public policy, Rosanvallon largely ignores the potential of participative and deliberative democracy models that leading Australian theorists such as John Dryzek have put forward to supplement representative democracy. Instead, he presents a set of three principles that will allow citizens to “appropriate” democratic functions and duties that have long been monopolised by parliamentarians, and two qualities that those who occupy executive roles need to engender democratic trust. Explicating these five building blocks of permanent democracy constitutes the heart of the book.

First, executive power should be “legible” — a term Rosanvallon borrows from other grand theorists of power such as Jeremy Bentham, Michel Foucault and James Scott. The public should be able to see how governments are organised and how they operate. In this he echoes another great Australian student of democracy, John Keane, whose monumental book, The Life and Death of Democracy, and its key concept of “monitory democracy” — recently elaborated in Keane’s latest book Power and Humility — he inexplicably ignores. Calling for an active “politics of legibility,” Rosanvallon argues that the deep legitimacy crisis of the European Union is largely caused by what he calls the “demon” of opacity. He observes that its three great institutions — the Commission, the Court of Justice and the European Central Bank — “might as well literally be black boxes, so completely do they appear to occupy a world of their own, their inner working hidden from view.”

Conspiracy theorists are given a field day in filling the vacuum. The hero of Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby, once said to his hapless minister Jim Hacker, who had publicly committed to an “open government” campaign, “Minister, you can be open, or you can have government.” Rosanvallon would probably turn that on its head: you cannot have a democratic form of government worthy of its name, and not be open. And so he advocates government transparency; but even more so, he exhorts citizens to filter, interpret and use the information about government operations that is already available.

The second principle is that of responsibility, which has a familiar ring to those of us who have grown up under parliamentary systems of government. Rosanvallon praises this principle’s power to underpin “democratic purification,” and to enable citizens to compel the executive branch to interrogate (and learn from) its own past, as well as to take responsibility for a just and sustainable future.

The third principle is that of responsiveness, which should take the form of an institutionalised willingness among those who govern to listen to those who are being governed, and an enhanced capacity for the latter to express themselves. For centuries, governments have focused on managing citizens’ minds, steering — these days we would perhaps add “nudging” — their passions and preferences. Rosanvallon mentions the quaintly named “Office for Correspondence Relating to the Formulation and Propagation of Public Feeling,” set up during the French revolution, as a case in point. Government should instead organise its listening capacity, while citizens should insist on developing new forums for discussing the most pressing matters of public policy.

This can only happen if those who populate the upper ranks of the executive branch once again become the trustees of the people. To advance this, Rosanvallon offers two key virtues fitting the age in which we live now: integrity and truthfulness. Truthfulness in rulers requires them to resist the ever-lurking temptation to treat falsehoods and obfuscation as core ingredients in their rhetoric (sound familiar?), which could ultimately produce the Orwellian situation in which politically instrumental fiction is allowed to overtake reality to the point of recreating that reality. (If we want a wall built, we call into being an “emergency” that legitimates its building.) Rosanvallon reserves his vitriol for these “demagogic appeals [that] demean citizens while pretending to exalt them.” He insists the people should act to bring back plain speaking as the norm for political leaders by waging battle against the lies, falsehoods, half-truths and what he calls “autistic” speech patterns of governing elites.

Calling for nothing less than a “second democratic revolution,” Rosanvallon ends his book by proposing three institutional devices that should lie at its core: the establishment of a council on democratic performance with the task of formalising the legal basis for the principles of a permanent democracy; of public commissions responsible for sponsoring public debate on key social issues, evaluating the democratic character of policy deliberation and verifying whether government are faithfully executing policies; and of civil vigilance organisations acting as monitorial watchdogs as well as promoting citizen training, education and involvement. All of this should be underpinned by a charter of democratic action to be approved by the people, ultimately given constitutional status, and policed by institutions of integrity such as the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life that saw the light in France in 2013.

Rosanvallon wants to “bring citizens back to the real economy of politics,” which “means replacing promises by truthfulness and integrity.” It is a high-minded, ambitious agenda, grounded in a persuasive high-level diagnosis of why our democratic electoral regimes don’t produce democratic government worthy of its name. At the very least, it deserves our attention and critical scrutiny. Ideally, Rosanvallon’s proposals should be developed and tested in experiments at the local level.

In my native country, the Netherlands, a blue-ribbon state commission has just produced a 370-page tome on the future of our democracy. The bulk of its attention is devoted to addressing what Rosanvallon — who barely gets a mention — would probably say is yesterday’s problem: how to restore parliament (and thus the democracy of authorisation) to its former glory, and how to balance popular democracy with the rule of law. There is not a word about the depth of the institutional crisis of representative democracy, let alone any serious discussion of how citizens themselves can ensure that the vast, complex and opaque executive branch becomes more legible, responsive and responsible. Nor is there any consideration of the qualities of democratic leadership that we should demand from those who we put in charge of this giant apparatus.

The yellow jacket protests symbolise ordinary French citizens’ deep disenchantment with their hollowed-out presidential democracy. Although Rosanvallon does not really analyse parliamentary democracies, the evidence shows that they share in that malaise. As Australia prepares for another highly competitive, and probably quite nasty, parliamentary election, much more about repudiating the current holders of executive power than any sense of being able to influence the activities of the next set of rulers, Rosanvallon’s book deserves a wide audience Down Under.

Perhaps Good Government will inspire those who care about Australia’s democracy to do better than the Dutch did and undertake a serious effort to “redefin[e] the relationship between the governing and the governed [that] will open the way to a clearer understanding of what must be done to bring about at last a society of equals” — the passionate plea with which Rosanvallon concludes his intellectual tour de force. •

The post Towards a second democratic revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

If this path is pursued, it could dramatically change how the digital media are shaping politics, society and democracy. It could match the mammoth effort that resulted in our system of copyright regulation.

But this is a big “if,” and success depends on whether the ACCC sticks to its guns and governments have the will to act. On the latter, recent history doesn’t inspire confidence.

We are, the ACCC says, at a “critical time… Digital platforms have fundamentally changed the way we interact with news, with each other and with government and business.” The ACCC comprehensively rejects the disingenuous claims of Google and Facebook that they are neither publishers nor media companies, but simply technology companies. Google and Facebook have used this fig leaf to avoid any suggestion, worldwide, that they should accept the responsibilities and regulations that usually apply to media.

The ACCC says that they are, in fact, much more than distributors

Digital platforms actively participate in the online news ecosystem by performing a wide range of functions other than news referral services, some of which overlap with the functions of media businesses. This means that digital platforms are considerably more than mere distributors or pure intermediaries in the supply of news and journalistic content in Australia.

Google, says the ACCC, is attempting to position itself as “the source of all information, and for news stories… an intermediary between consumers and providers of news and journalism.”

Dealing with Google and Facebook is more or less compulsory if news media companies want to reach audiences, says the ACCC. Yet the two giants also make it much harder for media companies to make money from journalism.

Traditionally, we have not looked to the ACCC — the ultimate dry-as-dust market regulator — for an understanding of hard-to-measure things like the civic importance of journalism. In its history of scrutinising media mergers, it has tended to talk of dollars, cents and markets for advertising, and little else.

We saw a change (though sadly with little effect) in the ACCC’s recent scrutiny of the Nine–Fairfax merger, where the talk, for the first time, was of the “market for news and information” — a concept dizzyingly close to the “market for ideas.”

In this report, the theme swells. The ACCC gets how journalism matters, and it understands the profound impact Google and Facebook have had. “News and journalism generate broad benefits for society through the production and dissemination of knowledge, the exposure of corruption, and holding governments and other decision makers to account,” it says, before drawing on the academic and industry literature to parse the different kinds of journalism and their importance to the public interest.

The report contains alarming data on the shift of advertising revenue from print media to online, and the losses of journalistic jobs that have resulted. Revenue from journalism began to fall in 2001 as classified advertisements became unbundled from the physical artefact of the newspaper. That transformation was completed more than a decade ago, but news media revenue has continued to decline. The report contains a particularly striking graph showing print media advertising dropping off a cliff in 2014.

Data provided to the ACCC by media companies show that, compared with 2014, there are now 20 per cent fewer journalists employed in what were once newspapers and are now print and online news media companies. That is a dramatic change to a key component of our democracy. And this has happened, as the ACCC notes, when the country’s population and economy have both been growing strongly.

While the new web-based entrants to news media — such as the Guardian Australia and BuzzFeed — have made important contributions to diversity, they have not gone close to offsetting what has been lost. According to the ACCC, six of the larger “digital natives,” with a combined audience of close to five million, collectively employ fewer than 250 full-time editorial staff. None of them reports local news.

The inevitable result, says the report, will be a reduction in public interest journalism. This has big implications. “Even those members of the public that do not read, watch or listen to the news benefit from the role journalism performs in exposing corruption, the creation of public debate and holding governments, corporations and individuals to account through their questioning and investigation.”

Within this changed media landscape, half of all traffic to news websites comes from either Google or Facebook, giving the two behemoths a potentially crushing market power. Says the ACCC: “While the digital platforms clearly value the news media content which they are able to display to their users, Google and Facebook each appear to be more important to the major news media businesses than any one news media business is to Google or Facebook.”

A key concern is lack of transparency about the algorithms that govern which citizens receive which news media content in their feeds. This means false news, political manipulation and “filter bubbles,” in which extreme opinions and tainted news are served to those most likely to seize on them, can all grow without society being able to counter or even scrutinise them.

So what does the ACCC recommend be done about this?

First, it suggests a change to merger law that would allow it to prevent Google and Facebook from gobbling up potential competitors rather than only those companies that already compete with them.

More significantly, it recommends a new market regulator with the power to investigate and demand information, including on those all-important algorithms that govern what news we read.

Finally, the ACCC recommends a separate, independent and comprehensive review of media regulation with the aim of designing a new framework of platform-neutral, modern and fit-for-purpose media regulation.

At this point in my reading, I felt like cheering. But it takes us back to that big “if” in my introduction. Will governments act? Will this report join the many others that have fallen into the dust?

The report lists more than thirty inquiries into aspects of the media and its regulation conducted by Australian governments and parliaments over the past twenty years. Most have done serious work and issued serious recommendations, only to be comprehensively ignored by governments lacking the political will to take on media barons.

Highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view) include the Convergence Review in 2012, the Finkelstein report into news media regulation, also in 2012, a brace of reports by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and more recently the report of the Senate Committee into the Future of Public Interest Journalism — which was already something of a zombie before it reported because its prime movers (Nick Xenophon, Sam Dastyari and Scott Ludlam) had trouble staying in parliament.

The last of those reports was one of the prods for the current ACCC inquiry, which began in December last year. And the ghosts of these previous inquiries live on in the ACCC report, which references them, picks up on key recommendations and pushes forward.

For example, the ACCC wants the new system of regulation of Google and Facebook to apply to all digital platforms that distribute news and media content and earn more than $100 million in the Australian market. The late, lamented Convergence Review — ignored by governments after its release in 2012 — also recommended a revenue-level determinant for who gets regulated, rather than the outdated platform-based approach.

The ACCC also foreshadows the issues it is considering making recommendations on in its final report, due in June next year, on which submissions are invited. Among these are the recommendations of the Future of Public Interest Journalism inquiry for news subscriptions to be tax-deductible for all consumers, and for investment in journalism to attract tax offsets.

Oddly, the report doesn’t pick up on the suggestions that donations to not-for-profit journalism enterprises be tax-deductible. While the report notes the impact of philanthropy and crowdfunding on journalism, it neglects this aspect. It does express a preference for tax measures to assist journalism, rather than direct grants or subsidies from government — though it says it welcomes submissions on grants as well.

And it signals a review of the regional and small publishers innovation fund — which was a $16 million sop government gave to publishers in the wake of removing restrictions on concentration of ownership. The ACCC basically wants to know whether this has worked, and whether it should be continued.

For what it is worth, my sources suggest that while the cadetship and scholarship parts of the program are valued, the innovation fund is so restricted in its requirements that it has failed to attract many applications. Publishers can apply for “efficiency measures, digital projects and revenue development projects” but not for what is most needed — a reporter or two to sit in court, get to the school fete or attend the local council meeting.

Meanwhile, the ACCC report suggests that any benefits under new tax laws be confined to journalism enterprises that meet certain standards. Pushing this idea further, it says it will consider recommending that Google and Facebook be required to badge news media content that comes from organisations that have signed up to standards and journalistic codes of practice. This is a ghost of some of the suggestions in the Finkelstein inquiry.

Combined, the tax and “trust badge” measures suggest that the Australian Press Council might get a fillip to its membership. At present, not all the new entrants to the media market have signed up. If the ACCC pushes through with these suggestions and they are adopted, the benefits of signing up to industry self-regulation schemes will include a badge of trustworthiness on Google and Facebook, and access to tax breaks.

There is much more in this report, and in accompanying documents that contain ACCC-commissioned research on how Australians are accessing news media and what they value. This is valuable stuff.

Some snippets: Just over half of Australians believe the news they consume is trustworthy — but only 36 per cent think that the news other Australians consume is trustworthy. The things that most build trust in news outlets are accurate reporting, reporting that is neutral and unbiased, and independence from political and government interests. Public broadcasters are also likely to be trusted. Less important in building trust was familiarity with the journalists employed by the outlet.

Other dismal figures include the fact that three-fifths of Australians don’t pay for news in any form, and most of these say they won’t pay for it in the future. This is where a tax deduction might make a difference.

On the upside, over three-quarters of Australians believe news services are important to them for engaging in Australian society. They value national and local news, and news about politics. The most valued categories of news include health; the environment; science and technology; crime, justice and security; Australian politics; news about particular industries; and “news of the day.”

The report also looks at privacy and how much consumers know and care about the data that Google and Facebook collect and hold about them. Here I have concentrated on the implications for news and journalism. And that leads back to the question of what will become of all this work. What can we expect of whichever government is in place when the final ACCC report hits in June?

The current communications minister, Mitch Fifield, has been at the centre of the leadership disruption that has crippled the current government. During his term he has continued the trend of removing outdated regulations without apparently considering that something more up-to-date might be needed to replace them. He has also been responsible for the “captain’s picks” that left us with an ABC board that lacks legitimacy. It would be astonishing if he had much headspace or political will left for taking on Google and Facebook.

Meanwhile, the shadow minister for communications, Michelle Rowland, is believed to be trawling among academics and others for policy ideas. The ACCC has given her plenty to chew on, but she is not a senior player in what is likely to be the incoming government. The ACCC report calls for a new regulator and a comprehensively new approach to media regulation, plus tax measures and participation in an international effort. If this is to come to anything, the most senior levels of an incoming government will need to get on board. •

Declaration: Margaret Simons made a submission to the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry and was consulted by inquiry staff. Her submission, submissions she authored to previous inquiries and some of her academic publications were cited in the preliminary report. She is also active in a number of associations that lobby on issues concerning the future of public interest journalism.

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Morrison showed he was comfortable, to say the least, talking about emotions; the speech was a veritable lovefest. “I love Australia,” he declared. “Who loves Australia? Everyone. We all love Australia. Of course we do. But do we love all Australians? That’s a different question, isn’t it? Do we love all Australians? We’ve got to. That’s what brings a country together.”

The prime minister might be surprised to hear an entirely different voice, from the other end of the political spectrum and on a different intellectual plane, also arguing for the primacy of love in politics. University of Chicago philosopher and lawyer Martha Nussbaum, author of this powerful analysis of the Trumpian crisis in American politics, The Monarchy of Fear, insists the way forward lies in love: not romantic love or even friendship, but a love that “simply consists in seeing the other person as fully human, and capable of some level of good and of change.”

They have little in common, our blokey Pentecostal PM, and Martha Nussbaum, winner of the prestigious Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2016. She is a prolific, informed and immensely readable philosopher and classicist. The Monarchy of Fear, her twenty-third book, continues her advocacy for the humanities and the arts, and her exploration of what she has called “political emotions.” She wants us to choose policies and institutions that “produce love, hope and cooperation, avoiding those that feed hatred and disgust.”

Indeed, Nussbaum’s vision of love in politics is more inclusive, more reasoned and more instrumental than Morrison’s. Not for her the nasty hint of exclusion in Morrison’s definition of “all” Australians: “whether they’ve become an Australian by birth ten generations ago, when my ancestors came… or if you came last week, if you’ve chosen to be here in this country.” Was this an unconscious act of delineation? Perhaps an error caused by speaking off the cuff, televangelist-style? But to judge the prime minister by his actual words, he does not include Indigenous Australians or detained asylum seekers among the loveable. This despite his insistence that loving each other “is what brings a country together.” The contrast with Nussbaum is strong.

She proposes, moreover, some general strategies to express love in practical public policy. Morrison’s speech was over before he had provided any detail on how he might translate his love into policy, or how it should shape his behaviour as leader. For Nussbaum, a decent society must learn how group hatred can be minimised by social efforts and institutional design. Mainstreaming schoolchildren with disabilities, for example, has been shown to alter how people see and feel about one another.

More provocatively, she calls for mandatory three-year programs of national civil service for young Americans, during which they would “do work that urgently needs doing all over America,” such as providing care for the elderly and children or building civil infrastructure. The essential feature is that young people would be sent away from their own neighbourhoods into different regions, so as to break down the isolating barriers of race and class and promote a sense of the common good: “The two problems are connected: because people don’t meet one another across major divisions, they have a hard time thinking outside their economic or racial group toward a sense of common purpose.”

Underpinning the idea are the benefits of young people seeing the diversity of people in their country, as soldiers did during the second world war, “only my young people would be trying to help, not kill.” Here then is one idea of a leading philosopher to “bring a country together.” She knows, of course, that it is wildly unrealistic, politically impossible. “But if people don’t talk about it, it certainly won’t be possible. So I put my cards on the table.”

It is a symptom of the times that this most powerful critique of the Trump presidency rarely mentions the man. This is deliberate and pointed. The Monarchy of Fear should not be confused with insiders’ accounts like Bob Woodward’s Fear or Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Nussbaum doesn’t get near the White House and doesn’t do gossip. No one has leaked anything to her. As a philosopher and classicist, she is fine with this. Her approach is to see through the individuals — the president, those who voted for him, and those who did not — in order to analyse their underlying emotions. This, rather than policy prescription, makes up the bulk of her penetrating analysis.

Nussbaum’s central argument, providing the tension that animates the entire book, rests on a simple and powerful contrast: a monarchy operates on fear while a democracy operates on trust. In a monarchy, the subjects fear the monarch above and the enemy outside; their fear of punishment and their yearning for security make them both compliant and servile. Democracies, by contrast, operate on trust: citizens need to trust each other if they are to place their future in each other’s hands.

The intellectual foundations of this critique lie not in political science or sociology but in moral philosophy and, more surprisingly to this reader, psychology. Specifically, Nussbaum argues that monarchic fear originates in the earliest moments of infancy. She uses the vivid simile of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, for whom the newborn, “like a sailor cast forth from the fierce waves, lies naked on the ground, unable to speak, in need of every sort of help to stay alive… And it fills the whole space with mournful weeping, as is fitting for one to whom such trouble remains in life.”

Birth introduces the human newborn to “painful solitary powerlessness,” and early infancy is “the stuff of nightmare” because — unlike any other mammal — the human newborn experiences a long period of complete helplessness and vulnerability, utterly dependent on others for food and warmth and shelter. Nussbaum concludes that fear is “genetically the first among the emotions.”

This fear has consequences. The infant quickly learns that to survive it needs to command the service of others: “The only way you can get what you need is to make some other part of the world get it for you.” This “imperious baby” is the proto-monarch, mastering its fear through intense narcissism and external control — but only enjoying fleeting reassurance before returning to insufficiency and terror.

Over time, of course, we grow up. Episodes of comfort give rise to feelings of love and gratitude, and we come to realise that other people are not slaves but have their own feelings and wants. As Nussbaum argues, this involves “a move out of monarchy in the direction of democratic reciprocity.” The bulk of her book elaborates on three dangerous emotions that she identifies as secondary outcomes of primary infantile fear: anger, disgust and envy. America, she believes, has fallen victim to them all. Fear can hijack legitimate outrage and protest, transforming them into a “toxic desire for payback.” Fear also infuses disgust — the aversion to mortality and embodiment — with strategies of exclusion, subordination and hate crime. Envy, too, is at large, stoking animus within the nation and presenting necessary social cooperation as a zero-sum game.

All of these damaging emotions contribute to the toxic brew of sexism and misogyny. Hostility to women in the United States, she argues, is driven partly by fear-blame: some men fear that women have refused their traditional roles as helpmeet, have taken what’s “ours,” and need to be disciplined. It is driven by fear-disgust: some men experience anxiety about body fluids, birth and corporeality, leading to vilification. And it is driven by fear-envy: some men see the educational and employment successes of women as marginalising them and cutting them off from the good things in life.

Here we see the strengths of a study of political emotions: the clarity and precision of her definitions, the breadth of her scholarship spanning ancient and contemporary political philosophy, and the sensitive insights she brings to discussing the range of potential responses to these damaging emotional forces.

There is much here that is relevant to recent and future Australian politics. In particular her critique of the politics of envy as practised by both left and right has strong echoes in our partisan debates, where the right fantasises about latte-sipping elites, Indigenous entitlement and ABC conspiracies, while the left targets bankers and big business. Contemplating our electoral landscape, with its simplistic tax-cut-versus-tax-increase binary, Nussbaum’s warning about zero-sum politics has loud resonance.

A Goldwater libertarian as a teenager, and a young woman who progressively embraced the political ideals of the New Deal, the social inclusion of the performing arts, the social justice of Judaism and the commitment to inquiry and dialogue in a leading academic institution, Martha Nussbaum dispenses her critique in a non-partisan fashion and without attacking individuals.

Yet she recalls that election night in 2016 — when she was in Kyoto to receive her award from the Inamori Foundation — as a moment of anxiety, then alarm, and then grief and a deeper fear for the United States, its people and its institutions. The first draft of what became The Monarchy of Fear was written then and there, and published as a blog post, in Australia of all places, by Scott Stephens, editor of the ABC’s Religion and Ethics website. (More recently she has written another blog post for Stephens on the Brett Kavanaugh hearing.)

“We rarely think clearly when we are thinking about ourselves and our own immediate time,” Nussbaum explains. This is another reason why she does not mention the name of the president too often. Instead, she turns to the past, and especially to the classical past, where she finds “historical and literary examples that we can discuss together without partisan defensiveness.”

She is not the first to use the classics as a sort of safe zone in discussing politics; Shakespeare made a career of it. But Nussbaum has a particular skill in bringing to contemporary relevance the debates and insights of ancient philosophy and politics. Socrates appears, of course, with his commitment to the dialogic method and the merits of the “examined life,” as does Thucydides’s analysis of how populism and the rhetoric of fear helped undo the Athenian democracy.

There is Aeschylus, too, whose Oresteian tragedy Nussbaum sees as a depiction not just of the emergence of democracy and law in Athens but also of the transformation of the spirit of retribution. “Like modern democracies,” Nussbaum comments, “the ancient Greek democracy had an anger problem.” In the play, the “Furies” — animal embodiments of anger and vendetta — are transformed into the “Kindly Ones” (Eumenides). It is significant, she says, that they are not caged or banished, but given voice and a home beneath the Acropolis, where they serve as instruments of justice and human welfare.

Anger, in other words, should be resisted in a democracy because it leads to retribution; far better is the philosophy of non-violence or, as she puts it, “non-anger,” exemplified by Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Like King, she separates the doer from the deed, denouncing the latter while recognising the former is always capable of growth and change.

But her favourite among the classics is Lucretius, the Roman philosopher-poet of the first century BC. Lucretius has been enjoying a bit of a revival, partly because of Stephen Greenblatt’s 2012 Pulitzer prize-winning The Swerve, which traces the accident of history that saw the sole surviving ancient copy of Lucretius’s remarkable De Rerum Natura saved from oblivion in the fifteenth century.

Lucretius informs much of Nussbaum’s argument about fear and envy. But there is a larger sense, too, in which she finds him of contemporary relevance and urgency. Living through “the beginning of the long decline of the Roman republic into tyranny,” Lucretius was an acolyte of Epicurus, and sought to explain his very Greek, pleasure-loving, emotions-based philosophy to his more rigid rational Roman contemporaries. The Romans, of course, tended to favour the detached denialism of Stoics like Cicero, Seneca and emperor-turned-meditator Marcus Aurelius.

In this endless and unresolvable debate between pleasure and denial, engagement and detachment, Nussbaum sides with Lucretius: “If you don’t have love for others, then the life of Stoic detachment or even cynical despair will make more sense than the life of hope, with its many demands.” A philosopher, that is, must love and be engaged in public life. •

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And yet with all this knowledge — he never attempted to hide any of it — the American people still chose him as their leader. I watched the count at a Democrats Abroad event in Canberra, and I’ve never seen a room change so quickly. Early confidence turned into mild panic, which then turned into open devastation, all within an hour. People were crying. If this was democracy, something was very sick in its heart.

Trump’s election was not the first sign of modern democratic malaise, nor necessarily the most extreme. Well before his triumph, academics observed a concerning “plateau” in global democracy, as the “third wave” of democratic expansion stalled, and in some places even went backwards. Trump’s success did, however, shock advanced democracies into attention. They could no longer ignore the trend — dismissing it as an affliction of lesser countries — or assume themselves immune to its authoritarian temptations. For the first time in a long time, they were forced to consider the unthinkable: could it happen to us?

Over the past year, a growing pile of books have dedicated themselves to answering this question. The titles give a sense of their morbid tone (How Democracies Die, How Democracy Ends, The Death of Democracy). While the books approach the topic from different directions — comparing contemporary cases of democratic failure, retelling the story of fascism in the 1930s, examining the modern system’s internal health — each takes the threat seriously. As they all acknowledge, democracy is a development in the history of politics, neither natural nor inevitable. It possesses vulnerabilities, at least under the right conditions.

In How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, two Harvard political scientists, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, examine recent examples of democratic collapse. The authors are well aware of the system’s fragility, having spent their careers researching authoritarian revival across multiple continents. Their book compares some of the most prominent cases — Venezuela under Chávez, Turkey under Erdoğan, Hungary under Orbán — in search of the common “warning signs” preceding democratic decline. For the authors, this exercise carries an urgent political mission: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. The promise of history, and the hope of this book, is that we can find the rhymes before it’s too late.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s basic argument is that democracy is less dependent on formal rules than on its guiding spirit. Constitutions might be necessary pieces of paper, even sources of national pride, but they only work properly when reinforced by norms and limited by taboos. Levitsky and Ziblatt call these the “guardrails of democracy.” Although largely unspoken, two in particular are important: “mutual toleration” (parties must view each other as more or less legitimate, not as an existential threat to society) and “institutional forbearance” (parties must allow government to function in some agreed-on way, not seek every possible mechanism to destroy their political enemies).

Democracy, at least from this perspective, is threatened when one side stops obeying the implicit rules of participation. Politics then becomes the continuation of civil war by other means. This is more likely in certain contexts, and particularly in deeply unequal and polarised ones: “When societies grow so divided that parties become wedded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually give way to perceptions of mutual threat.” This encourages the aspiring authoritarian, who promises to save one tribe from society’s other, fundamentally alien half.

The most dramatic example of this democratic breakdown — and the one that still haunts our political imagination — is Adolf Hitler’s destruction of Weimar Germany in the 1930s. This can be difficult to talk about, particularly in the context of contemporary democracy: it feels wrong to compare Nazism to other regimes as if the lessons of evil could apply to our more ambiguous political lives. In The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power, political historian Benjamin Carter Hett attempts this delicate task, tracking German politics from the trauma of the first world war and then the relative peace of the late 1920s, to the burning Reichstag building and the Enabling Act that opened the way to dictatorship. It’s a tale that can only be cautionary. We already know the terrible ending.

The collapse of Weimar Germany was a long process that ended very quickly. On one level, German society in 1933 was still split along the same lines as in 1918, between the myth of glorious national unity and the reality of military collapse. These history wars divided the country into political, economic and geographic camps. Financial crisis brought these latent differences to the surface, as did the crushing unemployment that followed. Here the book echoes Levitsky and Ziblatt: “For a democracy to work, all parties have to acknowledge that they have at least some minimal common ground and that compromises are both possible and necessary. By the 1930s, however, there was very little of this spirit left as German society grew ever more bitterly divided.”

From his earliest political interventions, Hitler openly expressed his opposition to Weimar democracy. Nazis never accepted the legitimacy of their political enemies, viciously targeting Jewish citizens and even attempting an armed coup in 1923. But for all its menace and the noise it made, hardline fascism was never popular enough to win power on its own. Hitler’s rise required the submission of other political figures who were well aware of his autocratic instincts. For establishment conservatives, the only alternative was governing alongside the Social Democrats — something that the aristocratic president, Paul von Hindenburg, opposed on principle. It was during this parliamentary stalemate in 1933 that Hindenburg agreed to make Hitler chancellor. He and other establishment figures thought they could keep the rabid dog on a tight leash. As Franz von Papen, Hitler’s vice-chancellor, boasted afterwards, “In a few months we will have pushed him so far into the corner that he will squeak.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt describe this as the “importance of fateful alliances” in democratic failure, and its message for modern politicians is clear enough. Other lessons from Hitler’s rise are less obviously applicable to the modern moment. For one, politics in 1930s Germany existed within a largely forgotten culture of political violence. It’s difficult to imagine now, but parties possessed their own paramilitary fighting wings, which clashed frequently and fatally. The Nazis employed theirs with a brutal logic. When the Reichstag burned down in February 1933, they immediately rounded up Communists and tortured them. When parliament debated the Enabling Act in March, Nazi stormtroopers surrounded the building, leering at the entering politicians. Hitler then murdered his remaining conservative rivals.

For those living in Weimar Germany, there was little doubt that democracy had been replaced with something else. (By November 1933, National Socialists were the only politicians legally able to stand for election.) This is another point where contemporary democracies diverge from the first age of fascism. Modern autocrats generally avoid clarifying moments of change. Their rise tends to be incremental; the exact moment of democratic death is difficult to diagnose. As the American political scientist Nancy Bermeo puts it, modern democracies are more likely to “backslide” until eventually they are unrecognisable. “Elected executives weaken checks on executive power one by one,” she writes, “undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces to challenge executive preferences.”

In some ways, the overwhelming horror of Hitler’s rise limits our understanding of contemporary authoritarianism. Unlike Germany in early 1933, modern democracies rarely explode in a single event. In developed countries at least, the military coup is largely a relic of politics past, as is the armed revolution. These dramatic gambles either rose or fell in a matter of hours; democratic backsliding can take years. As Levitsky and Ziblatt write, “Because these measures are carried out piecemeal and with the appearance of legality, the drift into authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarm bells. Citizens are often slow to realise that their democracy is being dismantled — even as it happens before their eyes.”

When democracy is threatened in 2018, it is more likely to resemble Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. Orbán combines genuine public support with pointed attacks on pluralist institutions. In 2010, his Fidesz party won a supermajority in parliament — which it then used to rewrite political rules in its favour. Previously impartial organisations now reinforce government interests. Gradually, Orbán ended state media independence, stacked autonomous bodies with loyalists, undermined opposition parties with heavy fines, and changed electoral laws to make parliament even more majoritarian. For all this, Orbán remains extremely popular, according to the available polling.

As David Runciman observes in How Democracy Ends, figures like Orbán are deeply paradoxical: popularly elected leaders who nonetheless use democracy’s legitimacy to justify its deconstruction. Is Orbán an autocrat? It depends whom you ask. Because of this ambiguity, those who think so can themselves be accused of conspiracy theory: “While the opponents of the regime shout, ‘Coup!,’ its defenders say that those accusations are hyperbole and hysteria. Lawyers and journalists who see themselves as the last line of defence against the subversion of democracy can be recast by the other side as just another group of ‘special interests,’ claiming the benefits of democracy for themselves.”

The modern autocrat accumulates power with more subtlety than the twentieth-century dictator, and is usually less openly combative towards democracy. This makes the whole process difficult to think about, let alone discuss in a common civic language. Compounding this, politicians often use democratic tools for undemocratic ends. When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sought to expand the powers of the Turkish presidency — and undermine legislative checks on his office — he did so by popular referendum. While the credibility of the process itself was challenged by Erdoğan’s opponents, the exercise raised another confusing paradox: what happens when a democracy chooses to vote itself out of existence?

Some of this, Runciman argues, is democracy’s own fault (“Democracy is not working well — if it were, there would be no populist backlash”). He compares its condition to a midlife crisis. It’s a slightly laboured analogy, but the image captures something of the moment’s sense of exhaustion, the pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction, and the desire of many citizens to take political risks. Part of this reflects democracy’s inability to grapple with genuine, perhaps existential, crises, like climate change. Next to more rigid and disciplined regimes, modern democracies can feel myopic, incapable of looking beyond the present. Part of the problem, however, is built into the system itself. As Runciman often puts it, democracies tend to “muddle through” their problems, generally coming to an acceptable solution, albeit often by accident. “The process is not pretty, and it creates a widespread feeling of disappointment.”

Runciman has covered similar ground before, particularly in The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (2013). As might be clear, he delights in paradox and contradiction, moments when the essence of a situation is different from what appears on its surface. If autocrats are on the global march, the news isn’t all bad, at least in the long run. While democracies face an urgent challenge to make politics feel “real” again to citizens — and not simply a spectacle performed at a professional distance — they possess hidden strengths, not necessarily shared by authoritarian equivalents.

According to Runciman, the same factors that make democracies drift are the ones that make them survive (“the flexibility, the variety, the responsiveness”). The reverse is also true. The factors that make autocracies look strong in the short term — the decisiveness, the unity of purpose, the lack of institutional accountability — are those that let them avoid their most complex problems, often until it’s too late. If democracies erode, then autocracies tend to shatter. This was the essential pattern of twentieth-century politics; we are yet to see if it will be repeated in the twenty-first. •

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But Australia still has a significant democratic deficit. Not only because money is subverting political equality, or because media concentration is stifling pluralism, or because we’ve failed to properly provide for Indigenous self-determination, each of which is disturbing. The flaw I’m talking about is blindingly obvious once you see it, but often ignored. It is the fact that a significant minority of Australia’s adult population doesn’t have a meaningful say in the political process.

The people missing out are permanent residents — people who have made Australia their home but haven’t, for one reason or another, become citizens. To that group I would add people who have lived here, sometimes for years, on temporary work visas, as international students, or because they’re entitled to as New Zealanders. In 2016, non-tourist temporary visa holders numbered more than 1.5 million, or more than 6 per cent of the Australian population.

Some people might think that giving the vote to these residents is a ludicrous idea. They are not, by definition, Australian citizens, and some would say that, being non-citizens, they aren’t entitled to have a say in the country’s political processes.

This argument draws on the view that community is anchored in citizenship; in other words, that the Australian community is composed entirely of Australian citizens. But does that really mean that citizenship should be the exclusive basis for having a political voice? After all, “democracy,” by definition, is rule by the people, not rule by citizens. This deep truth is most clearly recognised in Article 21(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.”

It might also be argued that democracies have a collective right to determine the composition of their communities — that they should be able to determine who is within their “demos.” Nearly three decades ago, in his classic book Democracy and Its Critics, the political scientist Robert Dahl pointed out the absurdity of this view. It would allow nation-states to call themselves “democracies” even when they exclude a significant proportion of their resident population from the demos. As Dahl argued, “If a demos can be a tiny group that exercises a brutal despotism over a vast subject population, then ‘democracy’ is conceptually, morally, and empirically indistinguishable from autocracy.”

There are alternatives to these narrow and distorted views of democracy. Of particular note is the theory of social membership proposed by another political scientist, Joseph Carens, in his book The Ethics of Immigration. According to this theory, it is not the legal status of citizenship or the nation-state’s say-so that determines whether an individual is a member of the community (and therefore entitled to a political voice). Rather, it is the connections a person has to his or her place of residence — “the relationships, interests, and identities that connect people to the place where they live.”

The implications of this theory are clear enough: permanent residents and temporary visa holders are members of the countries where they have ongoing residence, and that membership entitles them to have a say, and ultimately an equal say, in the political process.

Contemporary Australia might fall dramatically short of this ideal, but the notion that ongoing residents are entitled to a political voice is not entirely alien. Residents, citizens or not, are entitled to vote in local government elections, for instance. This entitlement has its roots in the property franchise, but it can also recognise the interests of residents with a stake in the local government area. In another field, industrial relations, there is a consensus that all workers should have a “voice” at work, including permanent residents and temporary visa holders.

History also supports the argument that ongoing residence should be the basis of membership. What is usually remembered about the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 are its racist exclusions, particularly of Indigenous Australians, Asians, Africans and Pacific Islanders. What is less often recalled is that these groups weren’t excluded in the original Commonwealth franchise bills when they were introduced in 1901 and 1902. At the heart of those bills was a highly progressive principle of inclusion. In the words of Richard O’Connor, the NSW senator who had their carriage, they recognised “one ground only, as giving a right to vote, and that is residence in the Commonwealth for six months or over by any person of adult age.”

In his pioneering book Not Quite Australian, Peter Mares has proposed eight years as the threshold at which temporary visa holders should be given the option of permanent residence. Let me propose another principle to bring Australia closer to democratic justice: once migrants have resided continuously for twelve months in this country and intend to continue living here, they should be considered members of this country and entitled to a say in its political processes.

Why twelve months? It is the period underlying the concept of “usual residence” that determines the population estimates issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (more precisely, the ABS relies on the 12/16 rule, which only requires twelve months of residence within a period of sixteen months). These estimates have constitutional significance: under section 24 of the Constitution, they represent the number of the “people of the Commonwealth” that, in turn, determines the number of federal parliamentarians in each state.

For a living example of such a rule in operation you need only look across the Tasman. Permanent residents of New Zealand have the right to vote in elections after one year of ongoing residence, a rule that has been in place since 1975.

The disenfranchisement of permanent residents and many temporary visa holders is an affront to democratic principles; that it is not recognised as such only makes it more egregious. As John Stuart Mill wrote in Considerations on Representative Government, “It is an essential part of democracy that minorities should be adequately represented… No real democracy, nothing but a false show of democracy, is possible without it.” •

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An associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton since the 1970s, Morris had become a senior adviser to the president following the Democratic Party’s disastrous showing in the 1994 midterm elections, when the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress. Morris urged Clinton to adopt his “triangulation” or “Third Way” strategies, under which the Democrats would move to the political centre, adopting the best policies of both the left and the right and appearing sensible and pragmatic to the mass of non-ideological voters.

Morris also encouraged Clinton to view voters much as a business would its potential customers. “I felt the most important thing for him to do was to bring to the political system the same consumer-ruled philosophy that the business community has,” he told Adam Curtis in the 2002 documentary The Century of the Self. “I think politics needs to be as responsive to the whims and the desires of the marketplace as business is. And it needs to be as sensitive to the bottom line — profits or votes — as a business is.”

This involved an altered relationship between politicians and voters, in which the techniques of market research became central. Rather than offering a political vision based on deeply held principles, politicians would simply ask the voters what they want and deliver accordingly. “Instead of feeling that you can stay in one place and you can manipulate the voters,” said Morris, “you need to learn what they want and move yourself to accommodate it.”

A sex scandal forced Morris out of the Clinton White House in the lead-up to the 1996 presidential election, after which he began devoting himself to a much grander project: bringing direct democracy to the world via the internet. In 1999, he and his wife launched the website Vote.com and published a book of the same name. The concept was simple: the site would pose questions on contemporary political issues and provide rudimentary summaries of the opposing arguments, and Americans would log on and vote. Vote.com would then email the results to members of Congress as evidence of the popular will.

Though Morris was prescient about the internet’s ever-increasing potential for political campaigners, his Vote.com project demonstrated much of the hubris that defined the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. “As everybody learns to log on,” he wrote, “internet voting will become the centrepiece of our democracy.” Morris’s belief that internet-powered direct democracy would undermine and eventually replace representative democracy proved to be little more than a combination of wishful thinking and shameless self-promotion. He persevered with the website for several years, but it never took hold, and updates ceased in 2013.

Back in Sydney, in May 2000, Morris was the talk of the town. Appearing as a guest of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, he was the subject of considerable coverage in the local press, though the media’s interest in Morris had as much to do with his scandalous past as his vision for the future of democracy. Latham, though, was already a big fan of the “political guru” and his Third Way politics. “Morris is the Machiavelli of our time,” he enthused in the Financial Review in August 1999. “His success as a political consultant in the United States is now matched by his dazzling insights and advice in printed form. He makes the rest of us look like flim-flam on the atlas of public life.”

When the two met for dinner Latham was eager to gobble up any ideas Morris had about the future of Australian politics. Having long bemoaned the state of the Australian political system, “riddled with public distrust, broken promises and phoney expectations,” Latham immediately shared Morris’s optimism about the potential of digital democracy. He was also excited that Morris saw Vote.com as a lucrative commercial venture. “I’m keen to explore the potential in Australia,” Latham wrote in his diary. “Make a few bob and open up the Australian political system along the way. Sounds like paradise.”

Third Way Australia, Latham’s attempt at bringing digital democracy to Australia, launched in April 2001. Considerably less ambitious than Vote.com, it was open only to voters in Latham’s electorate of Werriwa, and would not include important matters of state, such as economic management and foreign policy.

“The decisions best suited to direct democracy involve value judgments,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on the day of the website’s launch. “They concern the relationship between people in some ethical or moral way. These are the issues on which people feel disenfranchised, where they have strong opinions but never get the chance to comment.” Examples he cited included online gambling, censorship, euthanasia, genetic engineering and human cloning, Aboriginal reconciliation, multiculturalism and the republic.

Latham planned to put a question to his electorate every week. “I will then be obliged to act on the majority view,” he said, “ensuring that the Werriwa decision is advanced within parliamentary debates, the Labor caucus and the media.” The initiative was welcomed by the Daily Telegraph, by Kim Beazley, and even by the Liberal Party’s Peter Reith. But it drew ridicule from Latham’s fellow ambitious backbencher Kevin Rudd, who pointed out a handful of its flaws in a short opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph. “We have just had the dot.com disaster in the economy,” Rudd concluded. “Does Mark now want to deliver a tech-wreck on democracy?”

In any event, in what has since become a recurring experience, Latham failed. He had hoped for at least 1000 participants on each vote, but achieved an average of just 300. “For those who do vote, the results and feedback have been good,” he wrote in his diary in August 2001. “But we have a long way to go before e.democracy takes over from the traditional system. The interest is not there. Dick Morris’s promise of a political revolution has stalled at the gates of the Bastille.”

One of the problems that Latham’s experiment faced was his commitment to the Labor Party, and its requirement that he support the decisions of caucus once policy positions had been debated and resolved. Regardless of what a few hundred of his constituents might have told him to do, he remained bound by the rules of his party. The next significant attempt to bring digital democracy to Australia tried to avoid this problem in an innovative way. Senator On-Line, launched in 2007 as “Australia’s first internet-based democratic political party,” had no platform or policies.

Senator On-Line was the brainchild of Sydney businessperson Berge Der Sarkissian, a man whose background did not augur well for those concerned about the possibility of the electoral system being gamed. In 2002 the Australian Securities and Investments Commission found that Der Sarkissian had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in making hundreds of applications for Telstra shares under false names, and banned him from holding a financial services licence for two years. To potential supporters of Senator On-Line, Der Sarkissian simply admitted his mistake and asked for a second chance.

Rather than try to influence politicians already sitting in parliament, Senator On-Line aimed to send its own people to Canberra — people whose explicit directive would be to represent the views of the majority, as expressed through the party’s online polls. Every Australian on the electoral roll would be entitled to a vote on each bill or issue, and Senator On-Line representatives would be contractually obliged to vote in parliament in accordance with the majority view. All of this was announced before the party had even invested in a software package to run the process, but Der Sarkissian remained sanguine. “If we were fortunate enough to get a seat,” he told the Canberra Times, “we would have six months to get it up, which should be plenty given that there are some packages available.”

Senator On-Line aimed to “bring Australian politics directly to the citizens,” but its electoral performances suggest it has done anything but. Having run Senate candidates in every federal election since 2007, its best results came in Tasmania and Queensland in 2010, where it received 0.45 per cent and 0.36 per cent of the vote respectively. But even these results were boosted by the party’s having been placed first on the ballot paper. In ballots where this advantage was absent, Senator On-Line’s vote has never exceeded 0.2 per cent. In 2015 the party changed its name to Online Direct Democracy, but the rebrand did little to improve electoral returns, and with the rise of more Web 2.0–savvy competitors, its prospects look grim.

Senator On-Line’s failings seem to have done little to deter other digital democracy enthusiasts. Max Kaye, a software developer in his mid twenties, began thinking seriously about digital democracy in 2013 after his formative political experiences proved disheartening. He had been involved in protests against staff cuts at the University of Sydney in 2012, but was horrified when socialists and anarchists took the campaign in a much more militant direction than he was comfortable with. The following year he volunteered on the Greens’ federal election campaign in the Hunter Valley. Again he was left unimpressed. “I started to realise that a lot of these organisations really don’t engage deeply with how they want to achieve their goals,” he tells me. “And when their goals seem to conflict with reality in some way, they just ignore reality.”

It was around this time that Kaye met Nathan Spataro. Both were involved in Australia’s bitcoin community, and were excited about the wider potential of blockchain: the technology behind the burgeoning cryptocurrency. Blockchain appeared to solve some of the security and privacy problems that had hampered earlier attempts to advance digital democracy, and in 2015 the pair launched the Neutral Voting Bloc. Described on its website as “a political party for the modern age; like an app, a political app,” the Neutral Voting Bloc’s initial aim was to win one per cent of the national primary vote, which, via a “Senate preference hack” akin to Glenn Druery’s infamous preference whispering, could be translated into six Senate seats. “Will you be part of the 1 per cent to take back democracy?” asked the website, oxymoronically.

In early 2016 the party changed its name to Flux, and a redesigned website set about explaining the concepts behind the project. Unlike earlier iterations of digital democracy, Flux does not adopt a simplistic majoritarian approach to politics, in which the majority view should always prevail. Flux prefers a model called issue-based direct democracy, or IBDD, which, according to Kaye, “comes at the problem of democracy from an entirely novel position: that democracy should be designed around solving problems, not ‘the will of the people.’”

The key innovation is that participants have the ability to trade votes, which Kaye and Spataro describe in their paper “Redesigning Democracy” as “the magic behind IBDD.” The Flux software allows users to trade away votes on issues they don’t care about, in exchange for credits on issues they do. Thus, it is argued, on each issue the best outcomes will be achieved thanks to the specialist contributions of those most engaged.

The desire to empower specialists is fundamental to the Flux vision. “Good policy is informed by policy expertise,” its website declares. “Flux will enable specialists and experts, with the support of the Australian people, to meaningfully impact policy in their fields, in a way they never have before.” Kaye believes that “all evils are due to a lack of knowledge… and that the progress of people (and prosperity linked to that) is essentially unbounded — it’s just a matter of creating the right knowledge.” While this approach raises questions about the potential for self-interested specialists to game the system, Kaye is quick to reject the notion that IBDD would amount to a technocracy, and expects that non-specialists will be just as keen to sign up to Flux.

Flux received plenty of uncritical press attention in the lead-up to the 2016 federal election, but the free publicity did little to help the party in the race for seats. Its best results came in New South Wales and Tasmania, in both of which it received 0.28 per cent of the Senate vote. In the 2017 WA state election Flux polled 0.44 per cent in the upper house, but Kaye takes issue with the view that this was an underwhelming result. Filled with youthful enthusiasm, he remains optimistic about Flux’s prospects in future elections. But with its planned Senate preference hack — rendered moot by the Senate voting reforms passed in March 2016 — and its attempt to game the WA election by running twenty-six independent candidates with the sole purpose of directing preferences to Flux, there are considerable grounds for scepticism about the purity of its democratic vision.

“Delightfully naive” is how Peter Chen describes Flux. A senior lecturer in politics at the University of Sydney, with a special interest in new media’s impact on electoral politics, Chen told Reuters, “They’re obviously guys who are really focused on the tech thing and that has always been the problem with the e-democracy people. They’re often really tech-driven and they need political scientists at the brainstorming floor to say ‘well, I don’t know if that’d work.’” Adam Jacoby went through such a process in the development of MiVote, and believes he has come up with the best model of digital democracy yet.

Jacoby’s background is in the sports industry, where he spent twenty years creating and managing sports travel, media and logistics companies. But after having children, he began to think more deeply about the world they would inherit, and didn’t like what he saw. He felt that democracy was failing to deliver on its promises, and his children were facing a world in which their voices made no difference. “So then I started thinking,” Jacoby says as he sits in MiVote’s spacious Melbourne office, “if you were going to recreate democracy as a product, what does it need to do, how does it need to behave so that it delivers on the promise, it has integrity, people want to keep buying it, people want to tell their friends about it and tell them to buy it — what does it need to be?”

Following a number of conversations with software developers about the possibilities of blockchain, Jacoby became convinced that it was time for a “big strategic intervention” into the democratic process. He was introduced to Richard Hames — “one of the world’s greatest corporate philosophers and strategic futurists,” according to his own website — whose Centre for the Future then agreed to fund the early development of MiVote. Jacoby gathered a team of developers, strategists, researchers and marketers to help create a political movement based on the MiVote smartphone app, which was officially launched in February 2017.

The main distinction between MiVote and Flux is its “destinational” voting model, which aims to break down the left-versus-right binary that dominates democratic politics across the globe. Rather than offering simple yes or no votes based on legislation before the parliament, MiVote follows a convoluted process to come up with four policy destinations on each issue: one from the left, one from the right, one from the centre and one entirely out of left field.

After being provided with an information pack, app users are asked to choose the option that “most accurately represents the direction you would like the policy to head.” They can choose as many as they like, or none at all. Unlike Senator On-Line and Flux, MiVote is not a registered political party and will not contest elections. Instead, it will offer its software to candidates for office who pledge to uphold MiVote’s constitution.

“Democracy without the politics” was Jacoby’s preposterous claim at the time of MiVote’s launch. The desire to move beyond ideology is a characteristic of many digital democracy start-ups, but is most pronounced in MiVote. “We’re trying, as much as is humanly possible, to reinforce that this is a place of objectivity,” says Jacoby. “Although we may as individuals have ideological beliefs, they don’t play a part in the way that politics should work. There needs to be a place where you can just get information and have your say.”

Jacoby wants to eradicate the inherently messy, ugly battles over ideas and interests that are the inevitable product of democratic politics. Like Dick Morris before him, he believes that politicians should simply ask what their constituents would like them to do, and then act according to the informed majority view. Essentially, Jacoby sees democracy as a marketplace, and more than anything else, he is a salesman. His well-rehearsed monologues about “re-architecting” democracy come across as an unconvincing combination of naive idealism and commercially driven bombast.

The technocratic urge to rid democratic politics of its inherent messiness is not new, and is especially strong in the United States. Probably the most infamous example of a technocrat in power is Robert McNamara, president John F. Kennedy’s surprise appointment as secretary of defense in 1961. Armed with an MBA from Harvard, McNamara had been part of a team of air force veterans who used modern research, planning and management techniques to turn the Ford Motor Company around in the 1940s and 1950s. As Michael Boyle wrote upon McNamara’s death, he “believed that the methods of the behavioural sciences could be applied to government decision-making, to rationalise its operation and minimise the chances for error, and to create a government that was ruthlessly efficient.” The horrific reality of this approach was the slaughter and destruction of the Vietnam war.

More commonly, there is a tendency to turn to technocrats in times of political or economic crisis. A fully fledged “technocracy movement” came to national attention in the United States during the Great Depression, but interest quickly subsided. The modern preference for central bank independence — whereby unelected economists and bureaucrats are free to determine monetary policy without political interference — took hold in response to the inflation crises of the 1970s. In November 2011, at the height of the eurozone debt crisis, economists from outside politics were appointed as emergency prime ministers of both Greece and Italy, tasked with rising above the partisan bickering and steadying their respective economies. All of these examples share with digital democrats a scepticism about representative democracy’s ability to meaningfully confront the most difficult and divisive issues.

British political theorist Bernard Crick argued in his 1962 classic In Defence of Politics that technology had become perverted into a social doctrine: “‘Technology’ holds that all the important problems facing human civilization are technical, and that therefore they are all soluble on the basis of existing knowledge or readily attainable knowledge — if sufficient resources are made available.” Crick’s words are especially apposite in our present age of technological disruption, in which “like Uber, but for politics” is not just a sardonic joke but an accurate insight into the intellectual depth of some digital democracy evangelists.

The Scanlon Foundation’s 2017 Mapping Social Cohesion survey found high levels of dissatisfaction with Australian democracy, with 30 per cent of respondents in favour of major change to our system of government. Many voters appear to be in search of political certainty, and digital democrats believe they can deliver it. But as Crick warned, “the passionate quest for certainty in matters which are essentially political” is one of the great enemies of politics. “The quest for certainty scorns the political virtues — of prudence, of conciliation, of compromise, of variety, of adaptability, of liveliness — in favour of some pseudo-science of government, some absolute-sounding ethic.” ●

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Like most assumptions, this one says as much about our own unease and fears as it does about what it seeks to describe. We see a stable, strong Xi and a stable, strong China because we want to — and in the current uncertain geopolitical plight, because we need to — rather than because they are actually there.

The lengthy critique of contemporary China published on 24 July by Xu Zhangrun, who teaches law at Tsinghua University in Beijing, reminds us, first of all, that there is never a good time to stop paying attention to what is happening there, wherever else we might be distracted. As academic Gloria Davies pointed out in her book published a decade ago, Worrying About China, the history of Sino-anxiety is a long, honourable one, and has been proved plenty of times to be prudent and well founded.

Xu’s taxonomy of issues, and possible prescriptions, gives voice to a particular strand of domestic criticism of Xi Jinping’s leadership. We knew that these uneasy observers must be there, but for most of the last few years a remarkable silence has reigned, so near-complete that it has been unsettling. Can everyone have lined up behind the party’s new strategy so completely? Where is the often chaotic and scrappy China of the past, with its many discordant voices? Has Xi’s dose of nationalism and promised national resurrection been so effective in closing down dissent?

Xu’s essay confirms that the anxiety was always present, and has indeed intensified. His diagnosis is hardly novel, though it is elegantly put and comprehensive — as comprehensive as Xi’s ideology aims to be. Points about property rights, the lack of meaningful political reform, wasteful diplomacy and foreign aid, and official arrogance and malfeasance are made with caustic precision. Xu has simply cried out that the emperor is unclothed, and that Xi’s anti-corruption campaign has been, at best, a performance, with the party carrying on unchanged behind the scenes.

Xu points to the inconvenient fact that lies at the heart of Xi’s leadership. Despite the lazy assumptions about this being an era of neo-Maoist politics, the current party elite is working in a wholly different context. In the pre-1978, pre-reform era, the social contract in China was brutally straightforward. Under Mao’s charismatic leadership, the party created its own reality (with often disastrous social results) through its control of the press, and did so with minimal accountability.

Contemporary China, by contrast, is extraordinarily fragmented, with a billion different individualised networks created by social media, and a middle class focused relentlessly on what works for them. It’s not that they are brainwashed and made docile by party messages — it’s that they have in many ways moved beyond believing anything larger about the society around them. They buy into a strong, powerful China because it means security and wealth. They like the status this gives.

If the party and its leaders look like they are delivering on that promise, then all is fine. But if they falter (as has seemed to happen under Trump’s tariff assault), then all bets are off. The Chinese have become followers of the market and, unfortunately for the party, the market has infected not just economic life but also ideology, values and politics. Despite the party’s efforts to construct a Great Wall between the economy and the rest, the economy will always have a strong political dimension. Xi Jinping and the party are servants of this new China, and their frenetic activity and anxiety partly reflect this understanding.

The standard response from the party elite to an essay like Xu’s would be to consign it to the box marked “intellectual griping” or assemble the usual repressive machinery and close down the debate. But Xu’s prescription for the future includes many points that must have resonance. Particularly pointed are his observations about the need to restrain elite political power before it starts to eat into itself and repeat the mistakes of the past (with the difference that the costs of failure are now so much higher), and the need to change China’s diplomatic habits, which are proving wasteful and creating ambiguity rather than real friendships.

But there is a deeper problem. In his magnificent book, A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking, French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien talks of the fundamental difference between Western and Chinese thinking. The former tends to focus on action and intervention; the latter prioritises process and transformation, and strives to perceive deeper currents early on, deal with them, and achieve a positive outcome. The Communist Party, with its importation of Western Marxist thought, somehow married the foreign notion of intervention and action (to create a perfect socialist society through revolution) with a belief in slow, organic transformation. Mao, the great alchemist, tried to reconcile these two traditions in his 1937 essay, “On Contradiction”; it was a matter of living with the paradoxes until, one day, they worked themselves out.

Xu’s essay points out something important about this “great working out.” At some point, the attitude of the Communist Party, fuelled by its alien intellectual roots, could reach breaking point. Ideologically, it continues to pay lip service to a set of ideas (as Xu points out, the Politburo sets aside a day each April to study The Communist Manifesto), while the larger society tolerates its eccentricities because it delivers material results.

But Chinese society is moving into an era in which, as those material benefits become increasingly widespread, issues of meaning and value will come to the fore and demand something more than simple economic solutions. Xu has delivered a warning, and at least had the courage to present some solutions. Those who try to suppress his views can’t complain if and when a calamity comes. As Xu says in conclusion, “That’s all I’ve got to say now. We’ll see what Fate has in store; only Heaven can judge the nation’s fortunes.” ●

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It was in that dismal year that Arthur Hugh Clough wrote his famous poem “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth,” which ends with these lines:

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.

The struggle to which the poem refers is never spelt out, but the historical context and Clough’s own sympathies make it clear. Clough had spent 1848 in Italy, and was widely regarded as the literary representative of Chartism.

With more grim news from the US Supreme Court this week, it’s worth keeping Clough’s poem in mind. We have been in this situation many times before, and the temptation of despair is ever-present. Looking back, Clough’s resolute optimism was validated. It might have taken seventy years, but Britain achieved universal manhood suffrage in 1918. After decades of struggle by suffragists, women achieved equal voting rights ten years later. The other Chartist demands, with the exception of annual parliaments, were eventually achieved and are now taken for granted.

Australia felt the influence of Chartism almost immediately, and moved much more quickly. The Chartist program, including women’s suffrage, was in place by 1908 for everyone but Indigenous Australians, who had to wait another sixty years to achieve full citizenship.

Democracy has ebbed and flowed in Europe as a whole since Clough laid down his pen. It’s ebbing at the moment, but it’s important not to forget that dictatorships of the right and left ruled most European countries as recently as the 1970s. Authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán have certainly reversed recent progress towards democracy, but they remain constrained to some extent by its norms.

Across the Atlantic, the thought of unrestricted Republican control of the Supreme Court has led many to despair. Yet, while there are strong arguments to support a pessimistic view, a dispassionate view of the situation supports Clough’s exhortation that “westward, look, the land is bright.”

Even though the Republican Party has its hands on all the levers of power, it is still losing ground on most issues, both in terms of public support and in terms of actual outcomes. Among the most important issues for the political right are tax policy, Obamacare, equal marriage, gun control, immigration and reproductive rights. On all of these issues, the Republicans have lost ground since Trump’s election.

The Republican tax cuts are less popular than ever. Obamacare has survived, and there’s rising support for a single-payer system. Equal marriage is firmly established, and talk of a constitutional change to stop it has disappeared. Gun control, one of the few issues on which the right had gained popular support in the culture wars, is now back on the agenda. And despite Trump’s court victory yesterday, he has just suffered a humiliating defeat for his policy of “zero tolerance” and family separation for informal immigrants.

Meanwhile, public support for legal abortion remains as high as it has been in two decades of polling. Currently, 57 per cent say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, with 40 per cent taking the view it should be illegal in all or most cases. The issue has been effectively sidelined for decades by the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which will presumably be overturned by the new Supreme Court majority. But, looking at the history of the culture wars in the United States, there’s no reason to think that this will produce a victory for opponents of legal abortion in the long run. Rather, pro-choice sentiment will be translated into legislative action.

The examples, both economic and cultural, go on. More US states are adopting and lifting minimum wages. Confederate monuments are gradually being removed. For-profit education is in decline.

All this is not to say that progressives are necessarily on the winning side of history. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where the Republicans offset steadily declining support with steadily increasing voter suppression, for example. And the appeal of racist/xenophobic claims to a formerly dominant group that’s on the way to becoming a minority can never be underestimated.

On the other hand, if the existing support of the majority of the public translates into a congressional (or at least House) majority in November and a progressive Democratic president and Senate in 2020, a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court won’t be able to do very much.

At most, the court constitutes a veto point, able to block legislation that can be represented as violating constitutional protections. But most of the progressive agenda is clearly within the power of the legislature and executive. In the end, as the fictional Irish-American bartender Mr Dooley observed more than a century ago, “The Soopreme Court follows the illiction returns.” If the Democrats win the next few elections, the Roberts Court will be as much of a disappointment to its creators as the Warren Court in the 1960s. •

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What better way to get a fresh perspective on this question than to take two political scientists with little prior knowledge or experience of contemporary China, introduce them to some of China’s own leading analysts, immerse them in the published literature and data about the People’s Republic, and invite them to write a book that makes sense of what they have learned using the tools of comparative political analysis?

John Keane and Stein Ringen are political scientists with impressive academic credentials and little previous exposure to China. Keane is based at the University of Sydney after an extended period teaching and writing about politics in Europe. During his time abroad, the ABC lauded him as “one of Australia’s great intellectual exports.” Ringen is a Norwegian political scientist based at Oxford University.

Keane and Ringen share a distaste for the term “authoritarian” as it appears in standard political science literature and in specialist works about China. Keane challenges the use of the term in the titles of influential studies and the analytical frameworks adopted by their authors. He dismisses authoritarianism as a convenient label, or “mantra,” employed by blinkered observers to distract readers from the protean experiment that is China and to blind them to what the country has to offer to the world.

Ringen, who has studied authoritarianism before, objects on different grounds. After immersing himself in the Chinese case, he forms the view that what he sees bears little relation to what he has studied in Korea and elsewhere. In approaching China, he agrees with Keane that we should discard the term authoritarian altogether.

The two authors are also in general agreement about the nature of their subject matter. Keane sees corruption; nepotism; a widening wealth gap; intolerance of religion and dissent; environmental spoliation; censorship; widespread arrests of political opponents, rights activists and lawyers; and state officials acting like “thugs.” Ringen observes similar features, comments on them at greater length, classifies them in systemic terms, and relates his observations to his larger argument.

Both also agree that the Chinese one-party state is strong and resilient, although here they differ in the grounds on which they base their judgements. Keane believes the one-party state is enduring because it enjoys popular support, Ringen because it is single-minded in its commitment to control, innovative in devising new mechanisms of control, and ruthless in its willingness to deploy force.

So, although they start out from the same point and identify similar features along the way, the two authors arrive at polar extremes in their classification of the Chinese state. Keane finds China democratic, Ringen a perfect dictatorship bordering on totalitarian.

The journeys that carry them to these different destinations are worth tracking closely. Coming to China after completing a detailed study of social and economic developments in authoritarian-era South Korea, Ringen is struck by the differences. In contrast to South Korea, the China he finds is a one-party state with no separate civil service and no organised civil society to speak of, with non-government organisations that are basically off-budget arms of the state, and with a business community that is either embedded in the party or in thrall to it. The party rules by diktat. Apart from its size, he argues, there is little remarkable about China’s achievement relative to South Korea’s, whether measured by economic development, wealth creation, equity, or any form of evolving social compact. China’s achievements are overrated and its “model” in need of clearer elaboration.

As an aid to clarification, Ringen lays out three plausible hypotheses on the nature of government in China and tests them against what he finds. One is that China is a “trivial state,” a state that exercises control for no purpose other than self-preservation. Another is that China is plausibly a “welfare state,” with a purpose beyond itself that works for the good of citizens and is not overly ideological. The third option is that China is a “power state,” in which the party is an instrument of ideology and the state an instrument of the party. On the basis of his observations and comparative analysis, he concludes that China is a powerful “trivial state,” in search of an overarching ideology that could take it to the next level.

Keane’s approach is very different, more akin to the style of Jonathan Swift introducing readers to the people of Brobdingnag than to Ringen’s style of comparative politics. Readers are advised at the outset to set aside all preconceptions and “explore their own ignorance” before following Keane to a land that is “not what it seems,” indeed “almost a fictional place.” China, he informs us, is a “state of mind” among foreign observers, a “way of using words.” In keeping with these observations, he randomly scatters Mandarin words and phrases throughout the text — not in Chinese script but in borrowed Pinyin spelling — as if to acquaint his readers with the touch and texture of the words that make up the curious state of mind that is China.

His signature contribution is to sum up his findings in the observation that China is a “phantom democracy.” But readers should not be misled into thinking poorly of China on this account. Phantasms have had a bad rap since Plato, and need to be rescued by contemporary theorists who can see them for what they really are, which is to say, real. “Anybody who has experienced a mirage understands their materiality,” writes Keane. And what democracy is not a phantom after all?

He finds that the omnipresence of the word “democracy” in Chinese films, in textbooks, in uplifting speeches and declarations, in conversations with visiting scholars such as himself, suffices to warrant China’s inclusion in the ranks of democratic countries. In his subjects’ constant use of the term “democracy,” Keane discerns in China a rising trend towards a government willing to win the consent of the governed through innovative governance techniques, including local elections, opinion polling, and time limits on officeholders.

In the months since the publication of Keane’s book, the party has introduced a number of further innovations, including street-corner electronic monitors using facial recognition technologies, and personal “social credit” ratings, based on big data and artificial intelligence, that can block train and air tickets to citizens trying to head home for the Spring Festival. It is proposing to arrest likely perpetrators in advance of their crimes, using predictive modelling also based on artificial intelligence. Most recently, the party recommended that the National People’s Congress should abolish term limits on the office of president, and China’s parliament duly complied. To all appearances, Xi Jinping is introducing, and pioneering, twenty-first-century totalitarian techniques on an unprecedented scale. But that too may be a mirage.

And so, to return to our original question: what is it that we are dealing with? Readers wanting to understand China shouldn’t have too much trouble judging which of these authors has a useful perspective to offer. ●

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Everything, it seems, is contestable in this political free market. But recent developments suggest that the checks and balances vital to democracy are under threat on multiple fronts, just as the country faces a range of security problems, especially a rising terrorist menace and an unprecedented wave of extrajudicial killings by both police and vigilante gangs in the war on drugs and crime.

The latest attack comes from a familiar source, Rodrigo Duterte. The Philippine president is moving for the impeachment of two of the country’s most powerful independent voices, the chief justice and the ombudsman, in what is being seen as a sustained attack on the country’s institutions of accountability. While opinion polls show that Duterte, elected to the presidency last year, continues to enjoy significant public support, he has become increasingly impatient with criticism and constraints on his power and, Trump-like, furious at attempts to investigate his own affairs.

It doesn’t help that both the chief justice, Maria Lourdes Sereno, and the ombudsman, Conchita Carpio Morales, are women. The president’s difficulties in dealing with women in positions of authority are well-known and deep-seated.

In the Philippines, it is the president who appoints the chief justice from a list of three nominees provided by the Judicial and Bar Council. Importantly, one of the chief justice’s duties is to preside over the Senate in the case of impeachment proceedings against the president. All other impeachment cases are presided over by the Senate president.

Chief Justice Sereno came to the position amid controversy. She was appointed by former president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino to replace the late Renato Corona, who was removed from office in May 2012 because of his failure to disclose his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth to the public. Corona had been appointed in what Aquino called “a secret midnight swearing-in” a month before outgoing president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s term was due to expire, and just two days after Aquino had won the presidency.

The case against Chief Justice Sereno was originally brought by a lawyer, Lorenzo Gadon, who has said that he wants to avenge slights against former president Arroyo, now a member of the House of Representatives, and the disgraced Justice Corona. Lurking in the background while all this manoeuvring takes place is the family of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whose widow, Imelda, now eighty-eight, and son Ferdinand Jr (known as Bongbong) are still very active in politics.

According to the executive director of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, Ramon Casiple, the move by Gadon, a close associate of Arroyo, is nothing more than a ploy to position Bongbong for the vice-presidency and, by implication, the presidency should Duterte be impeached. The younger Marcos, who ran unsuccessfully for the vice-presidency last year, has an electoral protest against vice-president Leni Robredo currently before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, which just happens to be chaired by Chief Justice Sereno.

Despite a lack of evidence, the house committee on justice, packed with Duterte supporters, voted 25–2 on 5 October to impeach Sereno, even without discussing point-by-point Gadon’s allegations, which have since been answered in detail by the chief justice.

It was surprising to many that Duterte quickly endorsed the action against Sereno, even calling on her to resign rather than damage the court in any impeachment process. Duterte has also sought to discredit her by publicising the fees she earned as a lawyer, her supposed lavish lifestyle and alleged but unspecified corruption.

Hailed as a human rights champion and fearless defender of the judiciary, Sereno continues to attend to her duties and maintain a hectic public-speaking schedule. After she presented the closing address to the Philippine Economic Society a few days ago in Manila, she was mobbed, especially by younger attendees jostling to take selfies with her.

For her part, ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales’s crime seems to be her resolve to investigate the president. Duterte has accused her of conspiracy and using falsified documents relating to alleged undeclared assets, and says that the grounds for her impeachment would be what he calls selective justice. He promised to present his real bank records at any impeachment trial against Morales to prove that her office held falsified documents. He also initiated an investigation of the ombudsman’s office.

Undeterred, Morales said she would continue her investigation. “The office has already stated its position — to abide by its constitutional duty. No need to add more,” she said when asked to respond to Duterte’s latest statements.

Despite the storms swirling around Duterte — and his ominous references to the need for “revolutionary government,” which horrify the business community — he remains highly popular with men and women alike, according to the latest quarterly survey by Manila-based pollster Social Weather Stations. The survey, conducted 23–27 September, found 67 per cent of adult Filipinos satisfied, 14 per cent undecided, and 19 per cent dissatisfied with the president’s performance, with overall satisfaction having fallen by 11 points from 78 per cent.

How Duterte compares: thirty years of findings from Social Weather Stations

Duterte’s popularity among women is especially surprising, given his well-known problems dealing with them. His sister, Jocellyn, described him as a “chauvinist” in a recent interview — “When he sees a woman who fights him, it really gets his ire” — and recited a list of female critics that included his own vice-president, a senator who is now in jail, and the chief justice. All three crossed swords with Duterte after denouncing his brutal war on drugs, which has killed thousands of people since he took office in June 2016.

While campaigning last year, he joked about the gang rape of an Australian missionary who was killed in a prison riot. Speaking to Philippine troops in May, he said he would take responsibility for any rapes they might commit. But women’s rights advocates also praise him for distributing free contraceptives in his hometown, Davao City, where he was mayor for twenty-two years, and for championing a reproductive health bill opposed by the country’s influential Catholic Church.

In what is playing out in some respects as a Southeast Asian version of the daily crisis that is Washington under Donald Trump, Philippine democracy is once again being sorely tested not just by a president who resents and resists accountability, but also by the ceaseless, self-serving dynastic power struggles that have characterised Philippines politics for decades.

It is still in many respects a working democracy, with an admirably robust media, but its crucial institutions are looking increasingly fragile under the populist assault waged by Duterte. Just where all this will go is anybody’s guess, but the immediate future is, to put it mildly, very uncertain. ⦁

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Funds to the tune of $110 billion were promised to the Saudis to buy what President Trump describes as “lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the United States.” US secretary of state Rex Tillerson maintained that the deal was directed at preventing “malign Iranian influence” and went on to assert American support for those “elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.”

In between these two events, on 7 June, twin Islamic State attacks targeted two of Tehran’s most symbolic sites, Iran’s parliament and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, killing many civilians. The attacks were motivated by Islamic State’s belief that the Shi’a, who dominate in Iran, are apostates. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accused the Saudis of “complicity.”

In the United States, the Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher described the attacks in Tehran as a “good thing,” adding that “it’s a good idea to have radical Muslim terrorists fighting each other.” President Trump’s response was to “underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.” The military and economic pressures seemed designed to escalate an already dangerous confrontation. Equally strikingly, they also overshadow developments taking place inside Iran that hold out the possibility of a very different future.

After all, the Riyadh summit had begun just a day after a landslide re-election victory by Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, who sealed Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers during his first four-year term. At campaign rallies and in televised presidential debates, Rouhani promised to bolster civil society, fight corruption and open up Iran to the world, going beyond the normal realm of Iranian electioneering rhetoric. He attacked human rights abuses and spoke of the populace’s disapproval of the “executions and jailings throughout the last thirty-eight years.” He denounced the group of young extremists who stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran in January 2016 for stoking regional tensions. He accused the Revolutionary Guards of trying to sabotage the nuclear deal by writing anti-Israeli messages on test-missiles, and scorned their “cheering” of Trump’s pre-election promise that, in Rouhani’s words, “he would tear up the [nuclear] agreement.”

Rouhani had gained the endorsements of many prominent political figures, including Mohammad Khatami, the former reformist president (1997–2005), as well as Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, key protagonists of the “Green Movement” that erupted after the contested 2009 presidential election, who are now under house arrest. In the end, his victory over the conservative Ebrahim Raisi was decisive, by 57 to 38 per cent on a 72 per cent turnout.

Earlier, the parliamentary elections of February 2016 had seen reformists gain a working majority in the Iranian majlis. Many conservative MPs and prominent opponents of the nuclear deal were decisively rejected by voters. The city and village council elections, held on the same day as the presidential vote, also saw sweeping victories. In the key Tehran city council, all twenty-one seats were won by reformists, six of them women.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of the powerful Guardian Council, which vets all parliamentary candidates, described these elections as a “vast calamity.” The vetting of candidates for council elections is carried out by designated local parliamentary groups, circumventing the Guardian Council. In April, Jannati issued a communique that “non-Muslims” and religious minorities be barred from running. The reformist-dominated parliament ignored the Council’s assertion that the ruling was binding.

City and village council elections were initiated in 1999, and are a legacy of Mohammad Khatami’s efforts to strengthen civil society during his presidency. In one province alone – Sistan and Baluchistan, a predominantly Sunni province bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan – 415 women councillors. In the village of Afzalabad, ten out of the eleven candidates were women. One candidate, a thirty-three-year-old named Farahnaz, told reporters that “our men are either border guards or farmers; they do not have time to deal with village affairs.” Having gained her high school diploma, she had given up a university place after family opposition. Her aim was to improve paths to further education, because “educated women can create jobs.”

Fatemeh Kazemi is the returning councillor for the village of Beshareh, near the holy city of Qom in Iran’s conservative heartland. One of six sisters, she is single, believing that “marriage would create limitations for me.” When she was elected, not a single woman in her village had health insurance. She tapped into regional training and job creation schemes that allowed the women to work as carpet weavers, and managed to gain insurance cover for them. “When a lady can pay her own way, why freeload or get beaten on the head?” Kazemi says she told the women.

Another councillor, Nahid Eskandary, returned to her ancestral hometown of Sarakan equipped with a degree in law and criminology. She recounts having to overcome sexist attitudes and a local governor who persistently ignored her. With determination and after manoeuvring around the caveats of the health ministry’s funding programs, she established a screening clinic that offers mammograms, ultrasound and health checks to the residents. In Shahrekord, in Iran’s Kurdistan province, Parichehr Soltani argues that “society will not be developed” until women are fully represented in the political process, as “unfortunately some of our men are a hundred years behind the times.” Soltani was a prominent campaigner for Rouhani, maintaining that supporting him “would keep the shadow of war and sanctions at bay” and allow opportunities for women to continue to grow.

Only time will tell if such civic activism will increase accountability and prove to be “great free schools” of democracy. For now, a bulletproof glass ceiling bars women from running in the presidential race, and countless obstacles are placed in the way of political candidates in Iran. For many, though, the council elections have been a path to more senior positions. The governor of Hamoun, Masoumeh Parandvar, recalls telling the state governor, “I don’t want to be the token woman governor on display,” to which the governor responded, “Well, prove that a woman can do the job.” Parandvar maintains that ultimately constituents “don’t care about your sex” as long as you get the work done.

All this may well read like a list of inconsequential anecdotes, especially as it is often said that elections in Iran don’t herald tangible change. Yet these examples should not be too easily discounted. It was the city and village council elections of 2003 that saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad elected mayor of Tehran, paving the way to his becoming president two years later. His 2003 victory was made possible by a 12 per cent turnout during a voting boycott by many who had lost hope in the promises of the reformist government.

The decisive election victory of reformists in 1997 had inspired hope in the electorate. Khatami’s victory was based on an astounding 90 per cent turnout, of which he garnered 70 per cent of the votes. His tenure saw a temporary blossoming of grassroots movements and of the press. Even relations with the United States seemed on the up, and Iran actively supported the US campaign in Afghanistan after 9/11. Yet the government faced a brutal backlash at home and met with hostility abroad, with president George W. Bush branding Iran as part of “an axis of evil.” Khatami’s promise to end economic and political isolation collapsed, allowing the belligerent Ahmadinejad to come to the fore.

Following Ahmadinejad’s dubious re-election in June 2009, Iran saw the largest street protests in the history of the Islamic Republic. The demonstrators’ unifying mantra was “where is my vote?” They met a brutal crackdown: killings, arrests and purges. With the election of Rouhani and the signing of the nuclear accord, many Iranians believed that they were about to consign a revolutionary clique that thrived on war and isolation to the dustbin of history.

Zohreh, a senior academic sacked from her job following the purge of university faculties during Ahmadinejad’s tenure, describes her reaction to Rouhani’s re-election as “cautiously hopeful.” “For years I’ve lived with the sense of fear,” she goes on, “trying to second-guess people around me as I make my way round Tehran. Now they have to look over their shoulders knowing that we are the majority, we have the councils, parliament and now the presidency – and we made it impossible for them to steal our votes again.”

But she adds, “Let’s just hope there’s not another war.” Like many Iranians, she cannot ignore the eerily familiar pounding drums. In 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, starting a war that would go on for eight long years and leave more than a million dead. Iraq was backed by the United States and its Western allies; Saudi and Gulf rulers fearful of Iranian-style uprisings joined in.

“It’s a pity both sides can’t lose” was Henry Kissinger comment on that war. Saudi Wahhabism was championed as a counter to the Shi’a by the United States and its allies, and its extreme ideology spread to mosques around the world, from the streets of Karachi and Mumbai to Brussels, Paris and London. Then the “war on terror” made Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq a hospitable breeding-ground for extremist groups. The precursor of Islamic State/Daesh was founded in 1999 by Jordanian radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; it thrived in the battlefields of Afghanistan and grew more powerful during the ensuing conflicts in Iraq and Syria, sending millions of people in search of refuge. The deadly wars of the Middle East now play out in Western capitals, and the “great game” is no longer a spectator sport. In the end, we were all losers.

The opening salvo of the Iran-Iraq war began on 30 April 1980 with the siege of the Iranian embassy in London. The building was seized by a quasi-Iranian Sunni Arab “separatist” group, trained and equipped by the Iraqi regime, which claimed to be acting on behalf of Iran’s deprived border province of Khuzestan. There is no denying the difficulties that face that area of Iran, or others such as Kurdistan. But unlike much of the Middle East, the borders of Iran date back over two millennia; they are not lines in the sand drawn in 1916 by Messrs Sykes and Picot. The Arabs of Khuzestan were at the bitter frontline of the Iran–Iraq war, but a much-touted “fifth column” didn’t transpire then and is unlikely to emerge today.

What always emerges from war is brutality and retribution, hawks and jingoes. Before that war, in its post-revolutionary ferment, Iran had myriad political groups. Once the war began, they became brothers in arms fighting a greater enemy. The 1979 revolution and the aftermath of the Arab Spring are proof enough that the mere fall of dictators does not free a people.

Iranians know too well that freedom must come from within. During Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906, hopes of democracy were dashed and authoritarian rule was implemented with the help of colonial powers. A generation later, the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh was finished off in a coup backed by the United States and Britain.

What has emerged today is an Iranian populace that voted in large numbers for civil liberties and greater engagement with the world. They again face entrenched opposition at home and hostility abroad in their uphill struggle for democratic change. •

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As someone with fond memories of Arts classes at Adelaide University in the 1980s, I think Pyne should take a deep breath and count to ten.

I am one of many Australians who have deliberately broken the law to pursue a principle and contribute to a larger political campaign. I am thinking in particular of the protests against the damming of the Gordon-below-Franklin in Tasmania. In the summer of 1982–83, I joined hundreds of other protesters camping in the Tasmanian wilderness at Warners Landing, near the proposed dam site on the Gordon River. On the day heavy earthmoving equipment was brought up the river on barges, we attempted to “blockade” the site to prevent it from being unloaded.

Given the strong police presence, our protest was more symbolic than practical. After some cheerful running around in the bush, I was collared by a copper and charged with trespass. I spent the next week in Hobart’s Risdon Prison, because, like many others, I refused to accept special bail conditions that required us not to travel back up the river to rejoin the protest. The decision to exercise my right to refuse bail was also part of a larger strategy to drive up the political and financial cost of building the dam by overloading Tasmania’s corrections system.

This was – shock, horror – a clear case of breaking the law in a democracy, and while there may have been a few Marxists taking part, there was nothing anarchic about the action. It was highly organised and disciplined. Before departing for Tasmania, we undertook non-violence training and made a strong commitment to avoiding any escalation into confrontation, particularly with many Tasmanians openly hostile to “mainlanders” intervening in what they saw as a purely local issue. (A popular bumper sticker of the time read “Fertilise the bush, bulldoze a greenie.”)

According to Christopher Pyne, “Every citizen has to abide by the law. That’s how our Western democracy works.” Opposition leader Bill Shorten and many others on the Labor side of politics echoed that view as they scrambled to distance themselves from McManus and avoid predictable condemnation by the tabloid media and talkback radio. Shorten insisted that the way to change unjust laws is through the democratic process. “That’s the great thing about living in a country like Australia,” he said. “That’s what democracy is about. We ­believe in changing bad laws, not breaking them.”

So Martin Luther King Jr was not a democrat? He was arrested countless times for breaking the law, and when he led unlawful protests against racial segregation he did so in the name of democracy. In his famous 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, he correctly predicted that history would one day vindicate those African Americans who deliberately flouted the laws that forced them to sit at the back of the bus or banned them from eating in restaurants:

One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Today King is recognised as a hero and honoured in the United States with a national holiday.

Peaceful civil disobedience and non-violent direct action are not anti-democratic; they are part and parcel of the ethical tug-of-war that is social progress. Democracy is not infallible; majorities can and do support laws that are wrong. Plenty of examples dot our own history, including the White Australia policy and the systematic denial of fundamental rights to Aboriginal Australians. In 1965, Australia’s own freedom riders were threatened with arrest for obstruction when they tried to assist Aboriginal children to gain entry to the segregated Moree swimming pool. Among the law-breaking anarcho-Marxist students trying to foment social chaos at the time were James Spigelman, a future chief justice and lieutenant-governor of New South Wales, and Charles Perkins, who would go on to be a top public servant and be honoured with an Order of Australia and a state funeral.

In supporting the right of trade unionists to break the law in certain circumstances, McManus was not endorsing rampant criminal activity by the CFMEU, or suggesting that we can individually choose to follow the laws that suit us and ignore the rest. The threshold for civil disobedience is high, as are the potential costs.

In his letter from Birmingham Jail, King approached the question of what constitutes an unjust law from several angles. The first was theological: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”

The second was based on the fundamental question of human dignity: “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”

Third, King pointed out that Birmingham’s local ordinances contravened the spirit, if not the letter, of the decisions of higher courts, in particular the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education, which found that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the constitution.

Fourth, King tested the laws of segregation against the fundamental principle of human equality: “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.”

And finally, he pointed out that a law may appear just, but be implemented in an unjust manner: “For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”

The decision to break the law in a democracy is not one to be taken lightly. Above all, it requires accountability. Anyone who breaks an unjust law, says King, “must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.” When I deliberately engaged in trespass in the Tasmanian forests, I did so in the full knowledge that I would be arrested and face a penalty. I assume that the Christians who occupy politicians’ offices to hold prayer vigils for refugees on Nauru and Manus also know that they are risking arrest and sanction. When construction workers walk off an unsafe building site, or stop work because a colleague has been killed on the job, they are aware that they, or their union, will be hit with massive fines.

They also know, as we did in Tasmania, and as King did in Birmingham, that the act of breaking the law does not, in itself, bring about change; in the end, it is through parliaments, elections and court decisions that legislation is made, discarded or amended. Acts of civil disobedience and non-violent direct action are a way of bringing attention to the rightness or wrongness of an issue and advocating for change. Whether such campaigns succeed or not will ultimately be determined by broader public debate and the contest of ideas. The dam on the Gordon-below-Franklin was never built, because a majority of Australians voted in March 1983 to elect a government that had promised to halt its construction.

Sally McManus says that a belief in the rule of law is not inconsistent with refusing to obey laws that are unfair and unjust. King would surely agree. As he wrote, “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” •

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That trajectory, which once seemed inexorable, now looks to have been pushed into reverse. Powerful Western liberal democracies are struggling with significant existential crises, a number of increasingly authoritarian illiberal regimes have emerged in eastern Europe, the Middle East suffers from grave internal divisions (not all of them self-induced), and strongmen still rule African nations and are on the rise in Asia. Model states like Denmark and Sweden haven’t escaped these “dark emotions” either, with tribalist parties gaining significant traction.

One country seems to be bucking the trend, a country that could potentially claim to be humanity’s new light on the hill. But why, amid the world’s increasing instability, does Canada seem so remarkably comfortable and relaxed? Justin Trudeau might have brought a charming vibrancy and positivity to the office of prime minister, but he can’t be given sole credit. Deep structural factors have contributed; in fact, Trudeau’s charms would not have been the electoral asset they were without the right kind of political culture.

When Trudeau used the phrase “sunny ways” in his election victory speech, it was a throwback to the country’s seventh prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier. Laurier led the country from 1896 to 1911, and he used that phrase to describe his strategy for the rapprochement between the country’s anglophone and francophone communities.

As a modern state created out of two European colonial endeavours, Canada has a political culture and political infrastructure that is geared towards bridge-building. Anglophones have always been the more numerous of the two groups, but at around a quarter of the population francophones have been sufficiently numerous to exert considerable influence.

Although the country hasn’t always been successful in providing its French speakers with a sense of belonging, unlike Belgium and some other bicultural states it has never given up on the project. The desire to seek ways to improve the relationships between the state and its different communities, including its First Nations communities, seems embedded in Canada’s DNA.

The recent history of these efforts begins in 1963, when prime minister Lester Pearson formed the Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. The commission was charged with investigating the state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and recommending how Canada could further develop “on the basis of an equal partnership between two founding races.”

One result of this commission was prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s Official Languages Act of 1969, which transformed a basically monolingual federal government into a fully bilingual institution, especially giving increased rights to francophones outside Quebec, who had previously suffered from attempts to assimilate them into anglophone communities. Official bilingualism gave Canadians a greater opportunity to understand human difference, even if they weren’t themselves bilingual, and helped prepare the country for the multicultural society that was set to emerge.

While Canada isn’t the only Western country with a highly diverse population, it is generally seen as the pre-eminent example of a harmonious multicultural country. Since the removal of racial criteria from Canadian immigration policies in 1961, all Canadian governments have enthusiastically embraced immigration as an economic imperative. And, rather than simply creating a solid immigration program without providing detailed information about its benefits (a shortcoming of Australia’s approach), Canada has established a strong and positive public narrative about the benefits of immigration.

What Canada realised, and what seems to have escaped other Western countries (and particularly their conservative parties), is that open markets require open arms, minds and hearts. Canada has understood that free trade is an inherently cosmopolitan phenomenon, and if a country wishes to enjoy the benefits of freer movement of goods and services, then it will also need to embrace the freer movement of people and endeavour to understand the human differences that come with it.

But the “Ottawa Consensus” that had formed between the two traditional parties of federal government, the Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservative Party, has faced some major threats. The first came from the growing separatist movement in Quebec in the 1960s. This movement took two forms, the most troubling being the violent separatism of the Front de Libération du Québec. The FLQ was responsible for the bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1969 and, during the October Crisis of the following year, the kidnapping and murdering of a provincial Quebec cabinet minister and the kidnapping but ultimate release of a British diplomat. The public backlash and a government crackdown forced the group to disband shortly afterwards.

Promoting a democratic path to separation was the Parti Québécois, which gained enough traction to form government in the province in 1976. It then held a referendum to separate from Canada in 1980, only to be defeated by a no vote of 60 per cent.

By the 1990s, with the separatists refusing to give up, Canada faced threats on two fronts. A new federal separatist party, the Bloc Québécois (initially made up of six Progressive Conservative and two Liberal MPs), disrupted the federal parliament’s electoral norms and threatened to undermine the country’s unity. That prospect was only narrowly averted at the second referendum on Quebec sovereignty, in 1995. Alongside the existential threat to the state, the Ottawa Consensus faced an ideological threat from the formation of a new conservative force, the Reform Party, with its stronghold in western Canada.

Over half of Canada’s population lives within a diagonal corridor drawn from Quebec City to Windsor in Ontario. This makes the country’s electoral maths very simple: win the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor and you win government. For electoral strategists, this was often the only consideration, and electioneering and governing priorities tended to follow the numbers.

Ignoring other regions was bound to produce a blowback, of course, and this came in the form of major political resentment within the increasingly resource-rich western provinces, remote from the populous bilingual corridor and sceptical about the need for further investment in francophone services. This was fertile ground for the Reform Party, which brought together classical liberal economics and social conservatism – Fusionism, as it’s known – injected rhetorical steroids from south of the border, and disrupted the positive, pragmatic liberalism of the two traditional parties of federal government.

The 1993 election saw the Progressive Conservatives almost wiped out, their governing majority of 156 seats reduced to a tiny rump of just two seats. The Bloc Québécois won fifty-four seats and the Reform Party fifty-two. This created an odd situation: not only did it create an official opposition (the Bloc Québécois) who ran candidates in one province, but also sought the break-up of the country itself. At the same time, the Reform Party’s electoral gains gave the country a new electoral alignment of political ideals.

In 2000, the Reform Party became the Canadian Alliance in an attempt to win seats in the eastern provinces, where it had no traction, and to seduce the Progressive Conservatives into a merger in order to “unite the right.” The merger occurred two years later, with the Alliance’s leader, former Reform Party wunderkind Stephen Harper, heading a new Conservative Party of Canada. By 2006, Harper was prime minister, a position he would hold until Justin Trudeau’s election in 2015.

Harper’s worldview was undoubtedly more socially conservative than those of both the Liberal Party and the old Progressive Conservative Party. But while he may have maintained his Reform/Alliance veneer rhetorically, he made little attempt to implement any major reactionary policies. He had a conservative fondness for beefed-up law and order measures, and a nostalgia for the word “Royal,” which had been removed from the names of the Canadian navy and air force in 1968 but was now reinstated. But for the most part he governed like a conventional Progressive Conservative prime minister, not messing too much with the Ottawa Consensus.

He didn’t repeal Liberal legislation that he may have found distasteful, like the 2005 legalisation of gay marriage, and he worked hard to embrace the country’s multicultural character. He understood that the Conservative Party could only win elections by reaching out to Canada’s kaleidoscope of ethnicities rather than doubling down on the grievances of its Anglo base.

The latter parochial tactic does not carry much weight in Canada’s wider political culture. Unlike the agitated and pessimistic response of most of the Western world to the slow rate of recovery from the global financial crisis, Canadians were hankering for upbeat and inclusive rhetoric from their political leaders by the time of the 2015 election. Harper’s monotone delivery and negative demeanour had run its course in a country where “sunny ways,” although often subdued, were part of the national character.

In the current Conservative Party leadership race, only one of the fourteen candidates has made a concerted effort to harness any Islamophobic sentiment, although others may be inching towards the tactic. Unfortunate as these attempts to tap into racism are, they are clearly intended to rouse the emotions of the committed party members who will vote in the leadership race. Once elected, the new leader will have no electoral choice but to shift his or her rhetoric back towards the Ottawa Consensus.

This is not to say that the consensus on immigration holds universally. In Quebec, far from the conservative heartland of the western provinces, the debate about what constitutes “reasonable accommodation” of religious minorities still gains significant traction. In 2013, reflecting the aggressively secular model of France, the Parti Québécois attempted to legislate a Quebec Charter of Values, which would have banned public sector employees from wearing religious symbols (a move generally seen to target Muslim women). Outside Montreal, Quebec is the most ethnically and culturally homogeneous region of Canada, and the province has at times struggled with the country’s increasing diversity. When the 1995 sovereignty referendum was defeated, premier Jacques Parizeau famously revealed more than he might have intended when he declared that “we” had been defeated by “money and ethnic votes.”

These sentiments surfaced again during the 2015 federal election campaign. The Bloc Québécois ran an advertisement depicting a drop of oil morphing into a niqab, which appears to have assisted the party to win a handful of seats back from the social democratic New Democratic Party, which had swept the province in the 2011 election. But after the recent shooting at a Quebec City mosque, the current Parti Québécois leader, Jean-François Lisée, expressed some regret over these tactics. “It wasn’t a good idea to bring that idea into the Quebec debate,” he said in January. “It’s not easy to be Muslim in the twenty-first century. We could turn down our language while still debating our values.” The shooting seems to have shocked Quebec into reconsidering its approach to multiculturalism.

Self-examination of this kind ties into a strong and understandable desire to distinguish Canada from the United States. Historically, this sentiment has allowed Canadians to recognise flaws in the US system – especially its inadequate welfare system – and strive to avoid them in their own model of governance. Canada’s economy is heavily reliant on trade with the United States, so it can’t seek to provoke the new administration. But since Donald Trump’s election as president, Canada has been confident enough in itself to continue to pursue and promote the positive and pragmatic liberalism that has been the foundation of the country’s success.

For now, Canada’s primary existential threat seems to have subsided. At the 2014 Quebec provincial election, the Parti Québécois attracted its lowest share of the vote since it first ran in 1972, and it continues to poll poorly. Quebec separatism is increasingly seen as having essentially been a baby boomer project, with the average party member now sixty years old. A recent party report highlighted the fact that the party is perceived to be unable to reconcile itself to the young and vibrant multiculturalism of Montreal. Younger voters see the idea of separatism as limiting, not empowering, and the Parti Québécois is now seen as too insular to harness the aspirations of francophone youth. This development also indicates that reforms designed to give francophones a greater sense of investment in the Canadian state have worked.

Although it’s seen as a quiet, even mundane nation, in recent decades Canada has engaged in a contest of provocative and even (when the topic is Quebec’s potential separation) emotionally draining ideas. The public has become uniquely well-informed and willing to conduct positive conversations about the larger, universalist ideas behind the Canadian project.

The rise of inequality within Western societies is causing significant democratic problems, but it is inequality of knowledge that is becoming a deeper danger (although the two obviously overlap). It is here that Canada has done better than most countries – both actively and less consciously – in providing its populace with the tools to handle the current era of change and integration. Creating exactly the same conditions in other countries is impossible, but the country still provides a compelling case study of how liberal democracies can prevent a widespread backsliding into populist parochialism. •

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When that movement for fully democratic elections ended without result after seventy-nine days, some young protesters, angered by the lack of any concessions from the government in Beijing, turned to other strategies. Hong Kong has since seen the rise of “localism” – a focus on a city identity distinct from that of China – along with calls for self-determination rarely heard since the return to Chinese rule in 1997. Some localists launched angry protests against daytripping shoppers from across the border in mainland China, whom they accused of driving up rents in the city; others clashed with police in a row over street trading in early 2016.

Continuing evidence of China’s tightening grip on Hong Kong has only fuelled the backlash. Of particular concern has been the disappearance to the mainland – or abduction, as many in the city believe – of several booksellers associated with Hong Kong’s Causeway Books, which published and sold books claiming to reveal scandals in the private lives of China’s leaders. These worries were compounded in January when Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua was escorted from his Hong Kong residence to the mainland by a group of men thought to be acting on orders from the Chinese government.

Some young activists are now calling for independence from China, prompting a furious Beijing to label them as traitors. The government barred six localists from running as candidates in last September’s elections for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, or LegCo, reportedly because of suspicions that they supported independence. Yet public anger saw six others win election on a record turnout, with localist candidates taking an overall 19 per cent of the popular vote and more moderate democrats losing votes and seats.

The political temperature rose further after two of these new legislators changed the words of the oath at their LegCo swearing in, in one case cursing China. When legislature president Andrew Leung ordered them to retake their oaths, pro-government legislators walked out to prevent them doing so. The Chinese government’s subsequent intervention, ruling that the legislators could not retake their oaths, only added to a sense among democrats that Beijing was no longer willing to tolerate the “high degree of autonomy” it had promised the city in 1997.

Add to this the government’s attempts to disbar several other legislators, a recent attack on one of them at Hong Kong airport, the banning of a film seen as critical of China, and the filibustering of government bills by angry democrats in the city’s legislature, and you have an unusually febrile atmosphere. One commentator recently described it as “akin to a cold war.”

Yet a superficial glance at the campaign for the new chief executive might suggest that some of the bitterness is fading. For one thing, current chief executive C.Y. Leung isn’t standing for re-election. Leung took office in 2012 promising to unite all sectors of society, but many have blamed him for sparking the Umbrella Movement protests by allowing police to teargas unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators, a move that brought many previously apolitical residents onto the streets.

Leung’s loyalty to Beijing and seeming disdain for Hong Kong’s relatively democratic norms – he famously suggested that full democracy would give the poor too much say – alienated many residents. His plunging popularity, down to just 23 per cent in the latest polls, is summed up by the fact that many in Hong Kong, including some pro-business and traditionally pro-Beijing groups, have embraced a simple formula for an acceptable successor: ABC, or Anyone But C.Y.

Despite all this, it was widely expected that Leung, whose thick skin seemed to match his political ambition, would run again this year. Announcing his decision not to do so, he cited family reasons – his daughter has been in hospital – yet many observers saw the move as a sign that Beijing may be seeking to calm tensions in Hong Kong. (China may also reward Leung’s loyalty by giving him a senior post on a central government advisory body.)

“Of course it was Beijing’s decision,” says Jean-Pierre Cabestan, head of the Department of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. Cabestan argues that China’s leaders “can’t ignore” public opinion in Hong Kong, however suspicious they may be of it. “C.Y. had become a liability for the central government,” he says, “particularly after the LegCo election in September 2016 and the subsequent clumsy management of the pro-independence LegCo members.”

Those competing to replace Leung have certainly done their best to woo the public with soothing messages, not least pledging to heal the underlying economic divisions contributing to anger and disillusionment among the young.

There’s Carrie Lam, former second-in-command to Leung, promising to spend more on education, help small-to-medium enterprises, and subsidise housing for young people struggling with some of the world’s most inflated property prices. (She would do the latter partly by allowing building on some of Hong Kong’s large, and long-sacrosanct, country parks.)

There’s John Tsang, Hong Kong’s financial secretary for the past nine years and long seen as a fiscal conservative, who is now offering an even wider reaching scheme to provide public housing to 60 per cent of the population, and seeking to reach out to democrats with promises to push ahead with greater democratisation.

There’s Regina Ip, once a hardline security secretary, also offering to relaunch political reforms. And there’s even veteran rebel MP “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung, who once called for a boycott of the process of nominating a chief executive but has now announced he might run if enough citizens back him online.

The recent jailing of seven police officers for the televised beating of a pro-democracy activist during the Umbrella protests also hinted at some kind of closure. Police aggression at the time shocked many citizens who had previously retained faith in “Asia’s finest.”

Yet few expect the wounds in Hong Kong society to be so easily healed. For one thing, Hong Kong’s police have said they may appeal against the jailing of the officers, and more than 30,000 serving and retired police officers held an unprecedented public rally in support of their jailed colleagues in what one participant described as “the largest single gathering of police officers the world has ever seen.” The son of a late Chinese general poured oil on troubled waters by offering a cash reward for anyone who beat up the judge who jailed the policeman.

More broadly, implementing meaningful economic reforms will be no easy task in a society dominated since the days of British rule by tycoons, many of whom derive much of their wealth from real estate and have no interest in seeing property prices fall. Leung, who formerly worked for a real estate company, was quick to criticise John Tsang’s plan to promote public housing, warning that by withholding land from developers he would push up prices on the commercial market even further. Leung’s own failure to deliver on pledges to bring in social reforms, such as limits on working hours and a boost to pension rights, also highlight how hard change will be.

“I think that no chief executive in Hong Kong can really embark on reducing inequalities: blatant social inequality is part of Hong Kong DNA,” says Baptist University’s Cabestan, adding that this is “well accepted… What is less accepted has been the substantial reduction of social programs since the [1997] handover, in terms of affordable housing in particular. To be honest,” he adds, “C.Y. Leung has done better than his predecessors, but he has not gone very far: without the tycoons’ support, how can any chief executive operate?”

There’s one other crucial consideration. To win the post of chief executive in an election system that remains unreformed, candidates still need Beijing’s backing.

In 2014, the Chinese government offered political reforms including “one person, one vote” for the 2017 chief executive election – but only with a limited slate of pre-approved candidates, who would all, it was assumed, be acceptable to China. Many of the Umbrella protesters denounced this as “North Korean–style universal suffrage” and called for unrestricted choice. After the protests failed to win any concessions, democrats in Hong Kong’s legislature expressed their anger by vetoing Beijing’s reforms.

This has left the electoral process back at square one, with the chief executive, as in previous years, to be chosen by a committee of just 1194 people from different sectors of Hong Kong society. A minority of them come from democratic parties and traditionally liberal groups such as social workers and educators, but the majority come from pro-Beijing parties and social groups.

Beijing is reported to have confirmed its support for Carrie Lam, seen as loyal and a safe pair of hands, in a recent meeting between China’s top legislator, Zhang Dejiang, and pro-China Hong Kong delegates. Lam was once popular in Hong Kong, and may benefit simply from “not being C.Y.” but observers say she has been hit by her years as the public face of the Leung administration, and any candidate with China’s endorsement may struggle to win support across the board in such a polarised society.

Opinion polls routinely show around 40 per cent support for pro-Beijing groups, with a similar or higher number demanding greater democracy. The Leung administration’s efforts, until last year, to prosecute Umbrella Movement activists, and its continuing attempts to have four more legislators – including former student leader Nathan Law, and veteran democrat “Long Hair” himself – kicked out of the legislature have arguably only increased the divide.

No wonder, then, that Carrie Lam’s recent attempt to garner popularity by announcing plans for a new museum to house treasures from Beijing’s Forbidden City appeared to backfire. She was criticised both for her closeness to Beijing and for allegedly working on the project before public consultations were complete.

Similarly, John Tsang, despite his overtures to liberals and his lead over Lam in public opinion polls, is still regarded with suspicion by some for his role in Leung’s government. Tsang might also be hobbled by his apparent attempt (which he later sought to play down) to make himself acceptable to Beijing by reviving plans to introduce a controversial national security law, which was shelved after angry public protests in 2003.

Anson Chan, Hong Kong’s chief secretary under its first postcolonial chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, says that in Hong Kong’s “increasingly divided society… unlike in the old days, you’re not even able to sit down and discuss issues, and agree to disagree, without coming to blows.” She puts the blame squarely on Leung, who she says has gone “out of his way to talk about things that divide the community.” (Indeed, some critics have argued that it was Leung himself who stirred up the independence debate by picking up on, and attacking, an obscure student article referring to the topic, causing a backlash among localists.)

The atmosphere of suspicion is such that divisions in the democratic camp have grown too. Some older democrats have accused the two localists involved in the oath-taking controversy of being stooges of Beijing, sent to stir up hatred for liberals. “I think this [controversy] has been generated by the communists,” says Martin Lee, the retired legislator and veteran democracy campaigner. “I think these two guys [whose oaths were ruled invalid] were put up to it by someone… It’s a matter of logic.” According to Lee, who founded the Democratic Party, the pair “went out of their way – the girl in particular, she used swear words in the oath… insulting the whole Chinese nation. Now who would do that, unless there’s another motive?”

Others simply accuse the young activists of naivety – or egotism. Hong Kong’s last British governor, Chris Patten, a long-time supporter of greater democratisation in the city, warned on a recent visit that the activists’ “extreme views” could lose the “moral high ground” they had gained with the non-violent Umbrella Movement. They risked “diluting the campaign for democracy,” he said, “by arguing for independence.”

But Sixtus “Baggio” Leung, one of the two elected legislators disqualified over the oath-taking, says the pair simply wanted to speak up for Hong Kong, and thought that such behaviour had been tolerated before. Leung – no relation to C.Y. – says he has nothing against the people of China, but is adamantly opposed to the nation’s government. “I hate the People’s Republic of China,” he says. He argues that Hong Kong’s younger generation has been backed into a corner by what he sees as the hard line taken by Beijing and the Leung administration in relation to the promises of greater democratisation made at the time of the handover in 1997, as part of China’s “one country, two systems” formula for governing Hong Kong.

“If you look back to 1997, at that time our economy was not very good, but no one would yell for Hong Kong independence then,” he says. “So why, in 2016, when theoretically we are richer, are people doing this? Something happened, especially during the last ten years: Beijing is destroying our system and restricting our freedom.” Leung cites the Causeway Booksellers case, the disqualification of election candidates, the oath-taking row and Beijing’s subsequent intervention as examples. “These incidents have proved that ‘one country, two systems’ seems to have failed… The government is trying to use any way they can to destroy Hong Kong’s system, [its] separation of powers, rule of law. Do you still think that the so-called ‘moral high ground’ can defend or protect core values or rule of law, or [fight for] true democracy in Hong Kong?”

Jean-Pierre Cabestan says such a sense of disillusionment is increasingly common among young people – including students at his university, who recently used a graduation ceremony to criticise Beijing’s ruling on the oath issue. Many young people “don’t seriously want independence, but they’re just so angry,” he says, not least at Beijing’s “conservative” approach to political reform in Hong Kong. (Not only has it sought to limit the choice of chief executive candidates, but it has maintained the “functional constituencies,” or professional groups, that not only dominate the CE selection committee but also account for half the seats in Hong Kong’s legislature.)

“Some decided to push for independence not because they want independence per se, but because they want to send Beijing a very clear signal that it’s not kept its promises, and has actually frozen any kind of project for full democracy,” Cabestan says. This trend was highlighted by when an opinion poll last year suggested that more than a third of citizens aged between fifteen and twenty-four supported independence for Hong Kong.

This radicalisation has only added to the gap in understanding between the younger generation and Hong Kong’s older democracy activists, says Cabestan. While the latter group were galvanised by the Tiananmen protests in Beijing in 1989 and “cares about mainland China’s future – their final objective is the democratisation of all China,” he says that the young activists “only care about Hong Kong,” and often feel, rightly or wrongly, that the older generation has failed to push hard enough for political reform.

Beijing might well be happy to see the democratic camp fragmenting. But it is clearly alarmed by the rise of “hotheads” and growing calls for independence, along with other gestures such as the flying of colonial-era flags by some activists. And while it doesn’t wish to see chaos in Hong Kong, and may be seeking a more conciliatory chief executive, its apparent backing for Carrie Lam suggests that, even in an election that is likely to be contested only by candidates broadly loyal to China, the mainland leadership can’t restrain what many in Hong Kong see as its tendency to meddle in the city’s affairs.

The desire to control Hong Kong, where non-government and religious organisations are far more active than in mainland China, has increased since Xi Jinping became China’s top leader in 2012, according to Cabestan. “He wants to prevent Hong Kong becoming a base for subversion [of the mainland],” he says, noting that a number of Taiwanese political figures have also been banned from entering Hong Kong in recent years. “What they dislike the most is the growing cross-fertilisation between Hong Kong and Taiwan activists.” Xi’s aim, Cabestan suggests, is “to ‘Singaporise’ Hong Kong… to control the polity much more, but to keep the economy and courts independent as far as business cases go.”

There’s no doubt Beijing is now exerting greater control over Hong Kong’s media – with mainland-related companies holding stakes in or controlling major players including the main free-to-air broadcaster TVB and the South China Morning Post. Yet the media remains more open than that of the mainland and, despite China’s influence, Cabestan suggests Hong Kong’s “democratic culture” will be hard to shift, with the young less influenced by mainstream media. “They use social media to communicate, they read what they want,” he says. “So you get all these kids agitating – and that’s what worries Beijing.”

It’s worth noting, too, that revelations in Hong Kong’s media dealt a fatal blow to the campaign of Beijing’s preferred candidate for chief executive in 2012, Henry Tang, giving C.Y. Leung, originally an outsider, the chance to win.

And while some of those in Hong Kong who are more actively opposed to China may ultimately vote with their feet – one recent poll suggested that some 40 per cent of the population, and 57 per cent of eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds, would like to leave the city – many say they won’t leave, or simply can’t afford to. In a city that remains “on the frontline between liberal democracies and authoritarianism,” as Cabestan puts it, that means tensions are likely to continue.

Whether any candidate can win Beijing’s approval while smoothing over at least some of these tensions remains to be seen. Carrie Lam sought to play down divisions over policy by announcing, unusually, that she wouldn’t unveil her full platform until the formal election process begins in early March, stressing that “governance is not only about a manifesto. It is more about my heart, my attitude and integrity.”

Many in Hong Kong are hoping for less confrontational leadership, but winning hearts and changing attitudes may not be so easy in a city where even definitions of political integrity have become polarised. •

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The problem here is twofold: flaws in the political system as a whole – federalism, parliaments, accountability and the parties themselves – and flaws in the people chosen by the parties to act as the people’s representatives. With a decline in membership of political parties to under 2 per cent of the population, parties are hardly representative of the broader community, and political candidates consequently come to be seen as privileged members of a political class.

In a country that once entertained the idea of egalitarianism as a national characteristic, the notion of a political elite sounds somehow foreign and far-fetched; the “common touch” has been a trait much admired by the people and often feigned by politicians. Bob Askin, the controversial former Liberal premier of New South Wales, once characterised the public ideal of a political leader as being “just like them but slightly better.”

Despite survey after survey pointing to declining levels of trust, politicians are doing little to address this decline; indeed, a spate of well-publicised failings in recent months, mostly among state politicians, has merely added fuel to the fire of public cynicism. Human beings are fallible, of course, but public life demands high standards (like us, but slightly better) and when failings are revealed, the system takes a double hit: first, questions about the judgement of the political parties in promoting that person; and, second, an increased perception that, once in public office, politicians are no longer bound by the ordinary rules. (This is, of course, a variation on the theme developed by the great Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, who indicted communism for creating a “new class,” the title of his best-known book.)

In very recent times, the public has been treated to the resignation of Queensland’s agriculture minister, Leanne Donaldson, over a series of unpaid bills; of Victoria’s corrections minister, Steve Herbert, over his use of his official car to transport his (unaccompanied) dogs; and of Tasmania’s mining minister, Adam Brooks, over a perceived conflict of interest. An allegation of bullying has been made against Tasmanian police minister Rene Hidding; claims of undeclared business interests and illegal political donations have been levelled against the new NSW deputy premier, John Barilaro; South Australian water minister Ian Hunter has delivered a foul-mouthed tirade in an Adelaide restaurant; and disquiet has arisen over SA attorney-general John Rau’s bid to have himself appointed a senior counsel (his name was not on the circulated list of applicants, but he was ultimately successful). At the federal level, questions hang over the eligibility of two senators to take their seats. (One of them, Family First’s Bob Day, has since resigned; the other, One Nation’s Rod Culleton, is also under investigation in Queensland over a provocative letter he wrote to a magistrate.)

Amid these unedifying episodes comes the latest Scanlon Foundation survey of social cohesion, which points to a continuing decline in public trust for the federal government – down to just 29 per cent in 2016. Among respondents, concern about the quality of government and politicians ranked as second in importance just behind the economy.

The Scanlon report attributes declining trust in the political system partly to a failure to tackle issues supported by a majority of electors. When it sought views on current environmental and social issues, it found majority support for legislative action in four key issues:

• prescription marijuana for painful medical conditions (83 per cent either strongly supporting or supporting);
• medically approved euthanasia for people suffering terminal illness (80 per cent);

• reduced reliance on coal for electricity generation (70 per cent);

• marriage equality for same-sex couples (67 per cent).

The growing perception of an unresponsive political system has been accompanied by an increase in political disengagement. Taking the opportunity of its timing in the weeks after the 2016 election, the survey asked respondents how much interest they had in the election campaign. Fourteen per cent of respondents indicated “none at all” and 20 per cent “not much” – a total of 34 per cent. Analysis by age group and gender found that the highest proportion indicating “none at all” was among men aged eighteen to twenty-four, at 23 per cent, compared to 7 per cent of women within this age group.

The findings were consistent with earlier indications of a growing sense of political disengagement and public cynicism. A 2013 report on political engagement by the ANZSOG Institute for Governance suggested that citizens felt themselves relegated to the status of observers of formal politics and that 90 per cent regarded themselves as having no influence over the federal government. Other levels of government – ostensibly closer to the people – fared little better, with 70 per cent coming to the same conclusion about state, territory and local government.

The ANZSOG survey revealed evidence of negative attitudes towards politics and politicians comparable to those found in other contemporary democracies including Britain, the United States and Finland. But these attitudes had emerged in Australia in what was a relatively benign economic context. The level of discontent was disturbingly high, with over a quarter of Australians combining a set of substantially negative attitudes towards politics and politicians: irritation at politicians “talking rather than acting,” for instance, and at the deal-making involved in political life; and support for a greater role for non-political figures, including businesspeople and experts, in public decision-making.

The political insurgencies in the United States and Britain were attacks on political elites that were seen as unresponsive; so, too, was Rodrigo Duterte’s rise to power in the Philippines, and the rise of the far right in Europe, notably in Poland, Hungary and Austria.

Although these insurgencies are less in evidence here, that should not blind us to the dangers. Indeed, twenty years ago there was a foretaste of sorts in the 1996 election that brought John Howard to office, helped by the so-called “Howard’s battlers,” blue-collar former Labor voters who turned on Paul Keating with a vengeance. Keating, for all his vision, simply had no time for those who were left behind by the liberalisation of the economy, which he so ardently championed.

One Nation was a by-product in 1996, and its resurrection as a political force twenty years later is a warning signal. Its anti-globalisation themes and nativism resonate with much of Donald Trump’s rhetoric.

Political loyalties have undoubtedly fractured. In 1980, Labor and the Coalition captured 92 per cent of the House of Representatives vote; this year, the two major parties’ share was less than 77 per cent. Over those three-and-a-half decades, traditional voting patterns have been in decline, first with the arrival of the Democrats and their post-materialist concerns, and then with the rise of the Greens.

The traditional parties have lost ground and lost public confidence as political institutions. This year’s election confirmed what had long been apparent: voters have endorsed a multiparty system, with the Coalition winning 42 per cent in the House but just 35 per cent in the Senate, and Labor winning 34 per cent in the House and 29 per cent in the Senate. Only three-quarters of Australians voted for one or other of the major parties in the House and 10 per cent of those switched their votes in the Senate.

Regional differences also figured to a far greater extent than previously, which has possible implications for the major parties and their declining support bases. One Nation, for example, polled 10 per cent in Queensland and the Nick Xenophon Team won almost 22 per cent in South Australia. In terms of disengagement, around 20 per cent of those eligible to vote didn’t vote, didn’t enrol to vote, or voted informal.

The forces unleashed by the new mood are creating uncertainty, strategically as much as economically, in an increasingly volatile international environment. Confidence in political arrangements and those entrusted with political management have not been needed so critically since the dark days of the second world war, seven decades ago. On the available evidence, we appear ill-prepared to meet these new challenges. •

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What’s equally depressing is that Donald Trump’s victory was sealed by the votes of just over a quarter of eligible voters. Despite the high stakes, only a little over half of American citizens over the age of eighteen participated in the election. In itself, that isn’t a new development. In 2012, the participation rate was less than 55 per cent, and Barack Obama was able to garner votes from only 28 per cent of the electorate. In fact, the last time that more than 60 per cent of eligible voters cast their votes in presidential elections was in 1968, when Richard Nixon won; in a three-horse race with Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, Nixon was elected with the support of barely a quarter of the electorate.

In Australia, where voting is compulsory, people’s disdain for the political system is as pronounced as it is in the United States and in much of Europe. “Australians are so fed up with business as usual that they seem happy to consider crooks, spivs, vain millionaires with deep pockets and deeper self-interests, serial litigants, science deniers, one-issue nutcases, and the odd moron,” Fairfax’s Mark Kenny recently commented. Perhaps most worryingly, many of those fed up with business as usual look towards right-wing xenophobes. In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is as much the beneficiary as Nigel Farage’s UKIP was in the 2015 British parliamentary elections, Norbert Hofer in the recent Austrian presidential elections, and Trump on 8 November. Grassroots movements on the left of the political spectrum, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, and left-of-centre populist parties, such as the Pirates in Germany and Sweden, and the G500 in the Netherlands, have also benefited from the disenchantment with parliamentary democracy in its current form.

Australia provides further evidence that the system itself is in crisis. Since 2007, Australia has had five prime ministers, one of them on two separate occasions, because the incumbents were either voted out of office or removed by their own party when they were deemed too unpopular. The current federal government is not only distrusted and disliked by the majority of the electorate (less than a year after having been voted in), but it is also highly ineffectual, partly because it is afraid to make decisions that could make it even more unpopular or jeopardise its slim majority.

The Australian public has lost interest in elections, even though journalists try to make them appear interesting by reporting about electoral contests as if they were sporting competitions. Nevertheless, governments are in constant campaign mode. They are obsessed with opinion polls and try to pre-empt voters’ disapproval of their policies by submitting every initiative to focus groups before announcing it.

At least Australia’s Liberal–National Party coalition was able to form government soon after the elections. After the last elections in Spain, a new government only emerged after ten months. Belgium was ruled for 541 days by a caretaker government until Socialist Party leader Elio Di Rupo was finally able to cobble together a coalition government following the 2010 federal elections.

In Against Elections, the Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck lists the symptoms of a system in crisis: “low voter turnout, high voter turnover, declining party membership, governmental impotence, political paralysis, electoral fear of failure, lack of recruitment, compulsive self-promotion, chronic electoral fever, exhausting media stress, distrust.” He suggests that a system that seemed to make sense some 250 years ago is no longer adequate:

If the Founding Fathers in the United States and the heroes of the French Revolution had known in what context their method would be forced to function 250 years later, they would no doubt have prescribed a different model. Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark, not next to ideas but next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness?

Van Reybrouck says that elections are the anachronism at the heart of today’s malaise – that they are “the fossil fuel of politics.” He certainly has a point when he claims that democracy is not synonymous with electoral democracy, and that we ought to step back, acknowledge that “our current democracy is the result of a chance conjunction of circumstances over the past two hundred years” and question some of our assumptions about what democracy meant and could mean. He convincingly argues that electoral democracy in its current form has a rather short history, going back no further than the late eighteenth century.

Athenian democracy, which is often hailed as the birthplace of our political system, relied on sortition – the drawing of lots – more than on elections. So did the political systems of some of the Italian city-states in the Middle Ages. Sortition, in conjunction with rotation, ensured maximum participation and, in principle at least, no distinction between the governing and the governed (who could be tomorrow’s holders of power). It thus prevented the emergence of what populists like Trump refer to as the “establishment” or the “political class” or the “elites.” Of course, in Athens this was true only insofar as those eligible to participate in the democratic process were concerned: women and slaves were excluded from power.

According to Van Reybrouck, electoral democracy was not intended to empower the people. Rather, both in France and in the United States, the new elites wanted to disempower both the hereditary rulers and the people, who could not be trusted to govern themselves (and many of whom were initially not eligible to cast a vote).

Van Reybrouck believes that deliberative democracy is the answer to a system in crisis. He wants assemblies of citizens who have been selected by the drawing of lots, or by a combination of sortition and self-selection, to have a major role in policy-making. Participants would be compensated for their time and effort to ensure that they could join such a decision-making body. He also says how not to do it; he believes that Kevin Rudd’s 2008 citizens’ summit was an exercise in replacing the “elected aristocracy” with a “self-elected aristocracy.”

Van Reybrouck lists several examples of deliberative democracy in action to demonstrate that the model he champions has worked in the recent past. Among others, they include the 2004 Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in British Columbia and the 2013 Convention on the Constitution in Ireland. Where a referendum simply “reveals people’s gut reactions,” his model requires a group of citizens to arrive at an informed opinion (both by talking among themselves and by listening to specialist advice) in a lengthy process.

Could fellow citizens chosen by lot be trusted to arrive at sensible decisions any more than elected politicians? Van Reybrouck is optimistic: “We are all adults now and politicians would do well to look past the barbed wire, trust the citizens, take their emotions seriously and value their experience.” On other occasions, though, those same citizens may have been responsible for the election of the likes of Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump. Would they listen to each other and to expert advice? Isn’t there the risk that they would encourage each other to adopt extreme positions?

Democracy should mean more than being allowed to vote in elections every few years. But the prospect of a citizens’ assembly having a say about Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policies is no more enticing than what we have now. In the current model, cynical politicians try to play towards an audience they perceive to be overwhelmingly narrow-minded, xenophobic and egotistical, and formulate policies that disregard the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in order to be re-elected. The alternative to President Trump and Senator Hanson can’t be to put Trump and Hanson voters in charge of policy-making and trust them to make well-informed decisions that respect the interests and rights of others.

But while Van Reybrouck may not have the remedy, there is little doubt in my mind that his diagnosis ought to be taken seriously. The vote for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the success of the populist far right in elections across Europe suggest that something is seriously amiss. There are, of course, exceptions to the trend. New Zealand might be one. Iceland could be another one: there, last month’s elections were triggered by revelations that leading Icelandic politicians, including prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, feature in the Panama Papers. Anywhere else, the ensuing public outrage should have guaranteed a large vote for the populist far right. In Iceland, it didn’t.

The comparative weakness of right-wing populism in Iceland may well be the legacy of the politicisation of Iceland’s electorate during the Búsáhaldabyltingin, the Pots and Pans Revolution, in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis. The example of Iceland could also suggest both that Van Reybrouck has a point and that his model of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies is deficient. Between 2010 and 2012, Iceland experimented with deliberative democracy to draft a new Constitution. There, a group of twenty-five citizens was chosen not by drawing lots but by a popular vote (and later, when that vote was annulled, by parliament). But the twenty-five women and men weren’t left to their own devices; instead, all Icelanders were invited to become actively involved in the discussions. “Crowdsourcing for democracy” is how the Finnish scholar Tanja Aitamurto called these kinds of exercises in a recent book.

Arguably, that attempt to involve everyone raised the standard of political debate. But what works in a country with a population the size of Canberra doesn’t necessarily work elsewhere. It might suggest, though, that the crisis of electoral democracy could also be addressed by devolving decision-making to the local level, where it is more easily possible to involve all residents – not just citizens – in deliberative processes. •

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But the reality is that the choice of presidential candidate is just one of many decisions Americans will make when they vote on 8 November. And beyond electing representatives, voters in thirty-five states will also engage in direct law-making: deciding whether or not to approve a total of 163 ballot measures. The success or failure of those measures – on topics as diverse as compulsory condoms in pornographic films, the minimum wage, universal healthcare, campaign finance and repeal of the death penalty – will have an impact on the lives of more than 205 million people.

The contentious question of gun control illustrates how consequential ballot measures can be. In the face of recurring tragedy, measures in Maine and Nevada propose to eliminate the loopholes in background checks for gun purchases. According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, at least 70 per cent of Americans want this reform – and it’s not a fleeting sentiment, either. Majority support for universal background checks has been showing up in polling for decades. And yet Congress, swayed by intense pressure from the gun lobby, has refused to yield – or to introduce any other reform that might mitigate gun violence. The measures in Maine and Nevada, on available polling, both look likely to succeed, as did a similar initiative in Washington State in 2014.

Responding to an increasingly urgent debate about inequality in America, Hillary Clinton has committed to increase the federal minimum wage from US$7.25 to US$12. Even in the likely event she wins office, though, it’s unlikely her administration will be able to make much headway on the issue. Unless the Democrats achieve the near-impossible and win back the House as well as the Senate, she will face the insuperable obstacle of unwavering Republican opposition. Low-wage workers are much more likely to win a pay increase as a result of ballot measures than courtesy of Washington. Arizonans will decide whether to increase their state minimum wage to US$10 next year and US$12 by 2020 (along with guaranteeing a right to paid sick leave). Coloradans and Mainers will vote on similar propositions and Washingtonians will decide whether to vote up a minimum wage of US$13.50. Public opinion on these measures – which will, in total, cover 21.6 million American workers – is favourable in every state where they’re on the ballot.

State by state: leaders of ten different faith traditions urging support for the 8 November referendum to raise Maine’s minimum wage. Mainers for Fair Wages

While the ambition of establishing a comprehensive federal public health insurance scheme faded along with Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination, single-payer advocates continue to prosecute the case in Colorado. ColoradoCare would provide public health insurance for all residents, funded by a 10 per cent tax on payroll and other income. While the proposed tax hike (and the fact that even Democrats and progressives haven’t unified around the proposal) means the measure is likely to fail, an attempt to expand access to healthcare in another state is proving much more popular.

In California, Proposition 61 would cap prices paid for medicines by government agencies at the same level the US Department of Veteran Affairs does, estimated to be about 41 per cent of market prices. In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Bernie Sanders pointed out that while one-in-five working-age Americans can’t afford their prescriptions, the top five pharmaceutical companies made $50 billion in profit last year alone. “How have pharma companies gotten away with such avarice?” he said.

Sanders’s answer is that the companies that make up the industry “currently have 1266 lobbyists on their payrolls in Washington, DC, and 118 fighting for their priorities in Sacramento… And just this year, massive pharma lobbying efforts killed two bills in the heavily Democratic Californian legislature that would have made modest steps toward drug-pricing transparency.”

The lobby is investing just as heavily in trying to stop Prop 61. With a total of US$123.6 million spent by both sides so far, it may turn out to be the most expensive ballot measure campaign in California’s history. Big pharmaceutical companies are spending seven dollars for every dollar spent by supporters of pricing controls. Despite the lopsided campaign spending, though, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of Californians are saying they will vote yes on Proposition 61.

Measures in five states to legalise recreational use of marijuana are also garnering considerable attention this year. Polls suggest that they will succeed in California, Maine and Massachusetts and may get up in Nevada and Arizona as well. If so, a quarter of all Americans will be able to light up legally. Further measures on November’s ballot in Arkansas, Florida, Montana and North Dakota would permit medicinal use only.

Marijuana legalisation well illustrates the power of the ballot measure. Beyond their immediate impact, successful measures become precedents that change debates and, ultimately, the policy landscape. The spate of pro-pot measures this year comes after successful measures in Alaska and Oregon in 2014 and Colorado and Washington State in 2012. California’s second most powerful politician, lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom, told the New York Times, “If we’re successful, it’s the beginning of the end of the war on marijuana... If California moves, it will put more pressure on Mexico and Latin America writ large to reignite a debate on legalization there.”

Americans began embracing direct democracy at the dawn of the twentieth century, in the same surge of Progressive energy that resulted in term limits, popular election of national-level senators, and the right for women to vote.

Reformers saw citizen law-making as a critical tool in challenging the power of big business, particularly in the western United States, where politics was dominated by the all-powerful Southern Pacific Railroad company or, as it has been called, “The Octopus.” Southern Pacific was known to use bribes, threats and its monopoly over transcontinental trade to control elected officials from city councillors all the way to congressmen.

In 1892 a New York journalist, James Sullivan, published a detailed study of the Swiss system of direct democracy, Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum, based on his travels there. Sullivan argued that “much in proportion as the whole body of citizens take upon themselves the direction of public affairs, the possibilities for political and social parasitism disappear… and the privileges of the monopolist are withdrawn.”

Sullivan’s book was picked up by a budding politician, William U’ren, soon to be elected to the Oregon legislature as a member of the People’s Party. U’ren saw in Sullivan’s prescription of mass popular participation a solution to his state’s ills. When U’ren and the Populists gained the balance of power, they wrangled legislative support for an amendment to the state constitution that introduced the ballot measure as a new means of law-making. The amendment was overwhelmingly endorsed in a referendum – with 92 per cent of voters in favour – in 1902. What became known as “the Oregon system” was born. In 1911 the governor of California, Hiram Johnson (soon to run as a vice-presidential candidate on Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive ticket) introduced the ballot measure as part of a suite of reforms in that state. By the end of the Great War around two dozen states and numerous counties had adopted the ballot measure.

Ballot measures come in a variety of forms. The ones that most resemble an Australian referendum are legislatively referred constitutional amendments. While these are common, the most substantial measures in policy terms – and the ones that generate the most attention and controversy – are citizen initiatives. Ballotpedia, the wonderfully comprehensive encyclopaedia of American politics, estimates that of the US$744.8 million spent on ballot measure campaigns this cycle, 94 per cent of it has been devoted to supporting or opposing citizen initiatives.

Initiatives either alter statutes, create statutes or amend state constitutions. (Somewhat confusingly, initiated constitutional amendments are often used to change public policy rather than the machinery of government. The ColoradoCare measure is a proposed constitutional amendment; so is a measure to legalise medicinal marijuana in Florida.)

Unlike Australian referendums, citizen initiatives do not require the prior blessing of a legislature. To become law, the initiative first needs to get on the ballot by acquiring a requisite number of supporting signatures. It then needs to win the support of a simple majority of the state’s voters.

Signature requirements are calculated as a percentage of voters who turned out in the previous election. That percentage varies from state to state, but is generally around 5 per cent. Ballotpedia attributes the high number of citizen initiatives this year (seventy-two compared to thirty-five in 2014 and fifty in 2012) to low voter turnout in 2014. Whereas more than 500,000 signatures were required to get an initiative on the ballot in California in 2014, only 365,880 signatures were needed this year. That trend is constant across most states.

Still, getting that number of signatures is no mean feat. And the task is complicated in some states by an additional minimum percentage requirement for every individual county. In 2016 over 900 initiatives were filed with state authorities, more than ten times the number that made the ballot.

To succeed, petition drives need serious energy, organisation and money. Ballotpedia calculates that, on average, getting an initiative onto the ballot this year cost more than a million dollars, and the average cost-per-required-signature was US$5.51. Much of that money is spent on buttressing volunteer effort with paid petition-gatherers.

Then the campaign to win at the ballot begins. Initiative campaigns aren’t easy, but successes in the United States are a lot more common than successful referendums in Australia. There have been over 2000 statewide ballot initiatives in the United States over the same period that Australia has witnessed forty-four referendums. While the Yes vote has won in just eight of our referendums, over 800 ballot initiatives (around 40 per cent) have succeeded.

As well as creating law, citizen-initiated measures can also function to veto laws that have been passed by the legislature. There are five such veto referendums this year. In one case, some South Dakotans are seeking to overturn a youth wage of US$7.50 an hour created by the Republican-dominated legislature. The youth wage is, in turn, an attempt to undermine a successful 2014 initiative in South Dakota to lift the minimum wage to US$8.50 an hour.

Three advisory questions, similar in effect to Australian plebiscites, are on ballots in November. The most prominent, Proposition 59 in California, encourages elected officials to do all they can to overturn Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that struck down constraints on money in politics.

Citizens in numerous states also have the power to recall elected officials. While that power is not being exercised in November, the campaign to recall Aaron Persky, the judge who gave a remarkably light sentence to Stanford rapist, Brock Turner, is in full petition-gathering mode. That campaign aims to have a recall measure on the ballot in Santa Clara County, California, next November.

It all sounds positive and democratic, but not everyone thinks so. In a recent conversation with Vox’s Ezra Klein, political scientist Francis Fukyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man, questioned the assumption that more popular participation in the political process is a good thing, and singled out citizen initiatives for criticism.

Enthusiasm for the measures “runs up into the reality that most citizens don’t have the time, inclination, knowledge and background to actually make complex policy decisions,” Fukyama said. “You see this very much again here in California on the initiatives. So every election cycle you get this thick little telephone book of all of these initiatives. I’m a political scientist. I do not have the time and the energy to actually sort through the rights and wrongs of all of these... And yet every citizen in California is expected to be paying attention to this. So I think what happens is that the actual vote is not based on any kind of deliberative, reasoned, rational discussion of issues. It’s based on emotions and who does more television advertising and the like.”

Fukyama has a point. If he lives in the County of San Francisco, near where he works at Stanford University, he will join his fellow citizens in voting for the next president, a congressperson and a senator; a Californian senator and assembly member; a judge for the Superior Court of San Francisco; seventeen statewide ballot measures (California Propositions 51 to 67); and no less than twenty-four local ballot measures (San Francisco County Propositions A to X).

Command of such an array of decisions may be unrealistically burdensome, even for a highly politically engaged community like San Francisco. That said, it’s more likely that citizens are going to be inspired to get active and informed if they feel they can directly influence political outcomes. Ballotpedia’s Josh Altic and Geoff Pallay point to research that shows that “states that feature an initiative on the ballot in a given election year also feature higher turnouts, of between 3 per cent and 4.5 per cent in presidential years and between 7 per cent and 9 per cent in mid-term years, over states without an initiative on the ballot.” (Fukyama and his fellow voters can, where they are not confident about the rights and wrongs, always leave that part of the ballot blank without invalidating it.)

Sheer quantity aside, the nature of ballot measures sometimes makes it hard even for diligent voters to know what they’re voting for. In Missouri this year, two duelling initiatives share the apparent purpose of increasing tobacco taxes. Normally in cases where initiatives overlap, the measure that receives the most votes prevails. In the case of Missouri tobacco taxes, it’s generally believed that Amendment 3 (a 60 cents per pack tax increase) would take precedence over Proposition A (a 23 cent per pack increase) because the former is an alteration of the constitution and the latter is an initiated statute. But nobody is declaring this definitively: if it comes to it, the matter will be determined in the courts.

Perhaps more problematically, it’s not clear whether the initiatives are a genuine attempt to reduce smoking and increase revenue. Proposition A is heavily backed by the industry group representing petrol stations and convenience stores. Not only does the paltry proposed increase of 23 cents per pack seek to undercut Amendment 3, the initiative is designed so even that increase would automatically be reversed if a local or statewide measure to increase tobacco taxes appeared on the ballot in the future. Meanwhile, reports have suggested that 89 per cent of financial support for Amendment 3’s 60 cent increase has come from big tobacco company, Reynolds American. Apparently, it is also an attempt to head off more onerous anti-smoking interventions. Missourians could be forgiven if they feel the options before them are about as clear as mud.

Probably the most famous (and infamous) ballot measure in America is Proposition 13, passed in California in 1978. Prop 13 cut property tax from 2.6 per cent to 1 per cent and imposed a requirement that other taxes could only be increased by a two-thirds super majority in the California Assembly. The measure, which remains in place in California today and is politically untouchable, inspired a series of copycat initiatives (and helped launch the “Reagan Revolution”).

While Prop 13 undercut the state’s revenue raising capacity, other measures – such as Proposition 98, which defines minimum annual funding for California’s schools – demand significant outlays. When California’s budget deteriorated in the wake of the global financial crisis, the critique of “ballot-box budgeting” went into overdrive. One critic complained that “California voters are asked to approve outlays for emotionally resonant issues – mental-health treatment, school improvements, funding children’s hospitals – and time and again, they sign off. But the right to vote on an issue is always untethered from any notion of fiscal responsibility… The result is the unsustainable mix of opposition to tax hikes and enthusiasm for new spending projects that has put the state in its current fiscal morass."

The problem with this line of argument is that the claimed voting pattern just isn’t borne out by the evidence, in California or elsewhere. In fact, a study by the Initiative and Referendum Institute found that over the twenty-two-year period from when Proposition 13 was enacted in 1978 to the year 2000, most anti-tax initiatives that made the ballot in America failed. Of the eighty-seven initiatives to eliminate or reduce taxes in that period only 41 succeeded. That success rate (47 per cent) is higher than the success rate for all initiatives (41 per cent) but not enough to support the view that voters automatically privilege immediate self-interest over a more reflective consideration of the best ways to raise necessary revenue. In the period studied, twenty-seven measures were proposed to increase taxation, ten (or 37 per cent) of which passed.

The author of the Initiative and Referendum Institute study concludes “the evidence shows that voters are not reckless in their tax-decision making, that the majority of all tax measures fail, and that when tax measures do pass it’s usually the result of long-term dissatisfaction with current tax policy that elected officials have failed to address.”

As if to underscore the public’s preparedness to raise taxes and notwithstanding the murky situation in Missouri, increases in tobacco excise of around US$2 per pack are on the ballot in numerous states this year – and look likely to be voted up.

No doubt citizen-legislators make mistakes. But it isn’t clear that they’re more fallible than representative legislators. Arguably the most acute problem with American democracy is the gerrymandering of state and federal congressional districts by partisan (mostly Republican) state legislatures and governors. Districts that defy any geographical, historical or social logic are carved out to ensure they are so safe as to be immune from electoral contest (which is the main reason why it is highly unlikely Democrats will win back the House, even in the case of a huge anti-Trump swing against Republicans). It is in this context that legislators increasingly fear being “primaried” by an insurgent base more than competition in the general election. Thus the qualities of compromise and cooperation critical to passing laws – or even appointing a judge to the Supreme Court – have become anathema.

In 2010, the same California voters maligned by opponents of direct democracy approved Proposition 20, which placed districting in the hands of an independent, non-partisan electoral commission: the only rational approach. This year Amendment T in South Dakota proposes to similarly take districting out of the hands of politicians. If the stranglehold of gerrymandering is to be broken, it is likely to be through citizen-initiated ballot measures.

Australian debate over the same-sex marriage plebiscite has been, appropriately, much coloured by its constitutional pointlessness. Being neither a necessary or sufficient condition of changing the law – dreamt up, indeed, as an obstacle to that outcome – inevitably counts against it.

And yet equal marriage, like voluntary euthanasia, is an issue that well illustrates the case for the initiative in an Australian setting. On the one hand, sustained polling shows a significant majority in support of change. On the other, parliaments continue to misrepresent the will of the people. The citizen initiative could provide a useful corrective.

In the meantime, as the results roll in on 9 November all focus will be on the climax of a long, unedifying and often disturbing presidential campaign. It would be a mistake, however, to perceive American democracy purely in terms of that one electoral contest. •

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Nearly 800 of the smelter’s employees have lost their jobs this year, and are relying on the federal government’s Fair Entitlements Guarantee for unpaid entitlements. Legal battles are looming over who controls Queensland Nickel and how much the company’s debts to staff and creditors will end up costing taxpayers.

But Palmer’s woes extend to New Caledonia, just 2000 kilometres from Townsville, which has long been a major supplier of laterite ores to the Yabulu smelter. The mining and export of ores bearing nickel and cobalt provides a range of economic benefits to the French Pacific territory, which holds an estimated 25 per cent of global reserves. The minerals and metallurgy sector is the largest private employer in the island nation of 265,000 people.

In March, as Queensland Nickel went into liquidation, New Caledonia’s president, Philippe Germain, announced a new plan to tackle the current downturn. “Our mining framework has always prioritised traditional partners like Australia and Japan,” Germain said. “But if Australia can no longer buy the same levels from us, we need an alternative in the current circumstances, because we have mines, miners and sub-contractors who are dependent on this activity.”

Although New Caledonia has long looked to Japan and Australia for exports, it has mostly avoided selling high-grade ore directly to other countries, including China, in the hope of protecting the local smelting industry’s metal exports. As part of what he called a “temporary” plan, Germain announced that his government will allow increased exports of ore to China for twelve to eighteen months.

The recent fall in the price of nickel on the London Metals Exchange has come at a bad time for the French Pacific dependency. Globally, over 400,000 tonnes of nickel were stockpiled as production boomed with China’s economy still brisk. Now, the slowdown in Chinese steel production has contributed to falling prices. Beyond this, the island nation’s Asian competitors, Indonesia and the Philippines, have also been transforming their nickel policies. Jakarta banned the export of unprocessed ore in early 2014, and Manila has announced a floor price for the export of ore.

Many of New Caledonia’s east coast mines, along with the ageing Doniambo smelter in the capital, Noumea, are run by the dependency’s largest producer, Société Le Nickel, or SLN. Through its Strategic Investment Fund, the French government holds a minority stake in SLN’s parent company, ERAMET; the balance is owned by private investors.

Local New Caledonian leaders have criticised SLN for issuing more than €900 million (A$1.4 billion) in dividends in 2012 and 2013, but then seeking government support now that times are tough. SLN lost nearly €250 million last year and Doniambo continues to lose hundreds of thousands of euros each week.

“Metal markets, and nickel markets especially, are going through a very deep crisis; one that we have not known for at least fifteen years,” ERAMET chief executive Patrick Buffet said during a recent visit to Noumea. “For the most part, the crisis is due to a very unfavourable change in demand in China, as well as excess capacity over the last few years. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, and especially local ones, SLN is faced with higher production costs than those of its main competitors.”

Earlier this month ERAMET’s board of directors agreed to provide additional financing of €40 million to ensure that SLN operates until the end of June. (ERAMET has already provided temporary financing to SLN amounting to €150 million.) This will allow time for a decision on a €200 million loan foreshadowed by French prime minister Manuel Valls, who visited New Caledonia in late April.

The new financing to SLN will be issued through the Société Territoriale Calédonienne de Participations Industrielles, or STCPI, a holding company for New Caledonia’s three provinces in the mining and smelting sector; in return, STCPI wants to increase its shareholding in ERAMET from 34 to 51 per cent.

In Noumea, government policy since 2009 has tried to add value to the country’s vast nickel stocks by expanding nickel smelting rather than exporting raw laterite ore. Despite this, ore exports grew by 24 per cent between 2013 and 2015, with the growth focused on Japan and Korea. Exports to Japan alone grew from 26 per cent of the market in 2013 to 32 per cent last year; over the same period, exports to Australia halved from 27 to 13.6 per cent.

SLN’s exports of nickel metal have faced competition from two new smelting operations in New Caledonia, though both are experiencing problems with debt, technology and markets. The Goro smelter in the Southern Province, managed by Brazil’s Vale Corporation, has also made significant losses, amounting to US$400 million in 2015. Following major technical problems, which led to releases of acidic pollutants into nearby rivers and bays in April 2009 and May 2014, Vale is reviewing its strategy in New Caledonia.

Production delays and falling international prices have hit the Koniambo nickel smelter, in New Caledonia’s Northern Province, too. This project is managed by Koniambo Nickel SAS (KNS), a joint venture between New Caledonia’s SMSP nickel company (51 per cent) and the Anglo-Swiss corporation Glencore (49 per cent). Glencore inherited its stake in KNS in a May 2013 merger with Xstrata, and CEO Ivan Glasenberg has previously said “we are not married” to the Koniambo project.

Last August, protesting truckers blockaded Noumea for weeks, calling on the government to expand exports to China and other countries. And in February this year the government formally declared a crisis in the industry, opening the way for the allocation of grants from New Caledonia’s Nickel Fund, a subsidy scheme to assist miners and related sectors like transport and energy.

Even if new management can help Palmer’s Yabulu smelter revive production, President Germain said that “no one has a crystal ball to see if this is a sustainable solution. Today there is no calendar of boats scheduled to come from Australia to New Caledonia, so there is a danger for miners to transport the ore from the mountains to the coast.” For the next eighteen months, Germain said, “the mining companies are invited to prioritise exports to Chinese steelmakers, and not pig-iron manufacturers, in order not to undercut New Caledonian metal producers.”

Maintaining stability in the nickel sector has crucial political, as well as economic, importance for New Caledonia. In the 1980s, the French dependency was riven by violent conflict between the French state, the independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS, and opponents of independence among the territory’s large European population.

The signing of the Noumea Accord in May 1998 set out a twenty-year transition to a referendum on self-determination. Today, New Caledonia’s politics are marked by a level of intercommunal engagement that is quite different from the era of violent clashes that divided the country between 1984 and 1988. But in spite of fifteen years of multiparty government, economic restructuring and extensive funding from the French government, a significant gulf still exists between parties supporting political independence from France and those opposing it.

Before the Noumea Accord was signed, the Bercy Accord of February 1998 had opened the way for the transfer of nickel reserves and the construction of the Koniambo smelter in the Northern Province, where the population is mainly indigenous Kanaks and pro-independence parties dominate. The deal on Koniambo was a crucial precondition for the political settlement that came a few months later between supporters and opponents of independence.

The future for nickel once again weighs on Noumea’s political class, as New Caledonia moves towards its late-2018 referendum to decide whether to remain within the French Republic or achieve full independence and sovereignty. As Philippe Gomes – leader of the conservative Calédonie Ensemble party – says, “There can be no exit from the Noumea Accord without a consensus amongst us on nickel.”

Daniel Goa, president of the pro-independence Union Calédonienne, has stressed the importance of support for SLN and other nickel operators at a time New Caledonia is moving to a decision on its future political status. “We need SLN to maintain the peace,” he says. “The French state must act on its responsibility to ensure the future of employees and of the subcontractors who rely on SLN.”

For New Caledonia, the economic and political stakes could not be higher. •

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Austria’s new president, seventy-two-year-old Alexander Van der Bellen, is a retired professor of economics who led the Austrian Greens between 1997 and 2008. He is the first president since 1945 not to be nominated by either of the ruling parties, the left-of-centre Social Democrats or the conservative People’s Party.

In last Sunday’s election – a run-off after an indecisive first round on 24 April – Van der Bellen beat his forty-five-year-old rival, Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party, by a paper-thin margin of about 31,000 votes. Austria came close to electing a populist, right-wing, Eurosceptic president.

The election was preceded by a campaign that sometimes seemed entirely devoid of substance and lacking in any sense of political standards. Televised debates regularly degenerated into political mud-slinging. After a particularly ferocious debate, a public commentator bitterly summed up: “Both [candidates] disgraced, presidency damaged – discussion was at a kindergarten level.”

By the end of the campaign, a visibly exhausted Van der Bellen managed to convince a slight majority that he had a better understanding of the role of the president, whose main task, in practice, is to represent Austria externally. He successfully painted a scenario in which Hofer, having been elected president, would receive congratulations and support only from Europe’s far right. He convinced a shade more than 50 per cent of the Austrian population that a far-right president would damage Austria’s reputation in the world.

That argument would have resonated particularly with voters who remembered the embarrassment occasioned by the presidency of Kurt Waldheim (1986–92), who was declared persona non grata by the United States after he was found to be implicated in war crimes. And, indeed, a broad wave of relief went through political circles and the world media after Van der Bellen’s victory. “That is a weight off Europe’s mind,” said Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

During the campaign, both candidates drew attention to the power and role of Austria’s highest-ranking official. Besides the core tasks of representing the republic externally and swearing in the government, the president’s role was extended by a constitutional amendment of 1929. Theoretically, he or she is authorised to dismiss the government, remove individual members of a government, and even dissolve the parliament as a whole.

All presidents of Austria’s post-1945 Second Republic, however, have executed their office with sensitivity and reluctance. On only one occasion, in 1999, has a president intervened in a government-building process by refusing to swear in particular ministers. During the recent election campaign, Norbert Hofer repeatedly mentioned that he would dissolve a government that did not “follow his ideas of how a state should be ruled.” Van der Bellen, for his part, said on several occasions that he would refuse to swear in a government led by the Freedom Party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache.

The Austrian president might be entitled to act in this way, but the strict division of powers between president and parliament wouldn’t have given either man free rein. Parliament always has the last word, and the federal assembly, consisting of members of both chambers of the parliament, can dismiss the president and put an end to a presidency that exceeds its powers.

Presidential election results have never been closer than this in Austria. Van der Bellen gained 50.35 per cent, thereby more than doubling his vote in the first-round ballot in April. The other 49.65 per cent of electors voted for Hofer, who had focused on domestic issues, tried to draw on patriotic, if not nationalistic, sentiments, and made much of the current government’s handling of the 2015 refugee crisis.

One of the most important points of friction between the two candidates was their different attitude towards the 90,000 people who sought asylum in Austria in 2015 and towards the governmental responses to the refugee crisis. Van der Bellen, the son of Eastern European immigrants, advocates a policy of open borders and described the refugee influx as “a chance to integrate young and intelligent workers.” Hofer, on the other hand, has always opposed immigration and was one of the authors of the Freedom Party manifesto, which is widely regarded as xenophobic.

The result of the elections was evidence of a deep split within the Austrian population. City dwellers tended to support Van der Bellen; rural Austria predominantly voted for Hofer. There was also a significant gender gap: the firearm enthusiast Hofer gained more support from men; the liberal environmentalist Van der Bellen managed to convince 60 per cent of Austria’s female voters to support him.

Viewed according to profession and level of education, the split becomes even more striking. An overwhelming majority of blue-collar voters (86 per cent) supported the Freedom Party candidate, while white-collar voters largely supported Van der Bellen. The former economics professor also received broad support from tertiary-educated voters (81 per cent), while 67 per cent of voters who have completed an apprenticeship opted for Norbert Hofer.

What is happening in Austria? What explains the close result and the widespread support for Hofer?

For more than seven decades, this central European country has been ruled by a coalition government of its two largest political parties, the Social Democrats and the People’s Party. In the years immediately after the second world war, both parties had to find ways of overcoming the violent prewar differences that had erupted into a fierce civil war. They established a form of collaboration that later became known as consensual politics. In order to keep both partners satisfied, coalition governments sought to avoid disputes as much as possible. Austrian politicians became masters of compromise: every concession had to be bought by further concessions.

The Social Democratic Party’s Theodor Körner (right) became Austria’s first popularly elected president in 1951 after the death of Karl Renner (left). Marleen Zachte/Flickr

In the process, both parties became increasingly alienated from their voters, and their consensual style prevented them from carrying out necessary structural reforms. The nation’s agenda was buried in endless committees, political jockeying and meaningless rhetoric. Over the past two decades, political dissatisfaction grew among large parts of the Austrian population, and the support for both parties in state elections declined rapidly.

The annihilating results for the presidential candidates for both the People’s Party (11 per cent) and the Social Democrats (11 per cent) in the first round of the presidential elections on 24 April led to much soul-searching. On 17 May, the Social Democrats replaced the former chancellor (Austria’s equivalent of a prime minister), Werner Faymann, with Christian Kern, a businessman without any significant political experience. In his inaugural speech, Kern gave a damning verdict about the politics of his predecessors. “The meaninglessness of the past decades will be my driving force,” he said, adding, “If we continue to enact this drama, the drama of power obsession and forgetfulness of the future, then we only have a few months until the final impact. A few months until the people’s trust and support are fully used up.” Referring to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era initiative, he proposed a “New Deal” to overhaul Austria’s moribund state structures.

It is also important to remember that large sections of the Austrian population did not receive civic education in school. Politics was only introduced into Austrian schools as a subject a few years ago, and still doesn’t play an important role in school curricula. Consequently, many Austrians don’t know a great deal about political institutions, political decision-making, or – as we saw during the election campaign – the role of the president.

The past seven years have brought unprecedented challenges for the Austrian government. As a result of the lack of reform, unemployment rates are at an all-time high, economic growth is lagging behind the European average, businesses, entrepreneurs and scientists are leaving the country, and Austria’s universities are falling back in rankings. Billions of euros were lost in the self-inflicted fall of a major state-owned bank during the global financial crisis, and the refugee crisis has brought more than a million people through Austria since 2015, highlighting the government’s indecisiveness.

For decades, the governing coalition has been unwilling and unable to lead a discussion about integration and immigration. The Freedom Party was able to “own” these issues, exploiting them to create fear among the population. After their poll results deteriorated rapidly at the end of 2015, the Social Democrats and the People’s Party abruptly introduced a tough new policy of closed borders that contrasted starkly with their previous approach. Many commentators observed that the government, by trying to outflank the hardline Freedom Party, had lost its last shred of credibility along with its reputation abroad. In fact, the refugee crisis could be seen as the final catalyst for change in Austria, and the factor most responsible for the outcome of the presidential elections.

Is Austria drifting towards the far right? It may seem so. But what we are seeing should instead be regarded as a radical expression of a highly dissatisfied population, many of whom wouldn’t necessarily associate themselves ideologically with the Freedom Party. They wanted to express their discontent at an election that traditionally has not been given a high priority by many Austrians (there have even been debates about abolishing the presidency). Here again, part of the problem is the neglect of politics as a subject of study in schools.

Losing votes is nothing new for the People’s Party and the Social Democrats. In fact, Austria’s ruling political elite has been losing votes for more than two decades. The last national elections in 2013 allowed them to continue their coalition only with a wafer-thin majority of 50.81 per cent. The recent presidential elections and the high percentage of votes for Norbert Hofer must be seen in that context. The striking political dissatisfaction became visible during the first ballot, when the relatively unknown, liberal independent candidate Irmgard Griss managed to gain almost as many votes as the candidates of both ruling parties combined – without any party support.

Recent events reveal that Austria’s ruling elites have recognised the problem. The two highest positions in the country are now occupied by a president who doesn’t belong to either the Social Democrats or the People’s Party leadership, and a chancellor who – after strongly criticising the politics of his predecessors – proposes a New Deal for the country. Great challenges await both of them. •

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Across the north and east, Tamils held public events to remember the victims killed during the final weeks of the government offensive in May 2009. While officially sanctioned on a much wider scale than last year, these commemorations often took place under the watchful, often intimidating eyes of the military or police.

In Colombo, meanwhile, president Maithripala Sirisena and prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe sponsored a War Hero commemoration alongside the armed forces, police and civil security. But the commemoration’s cultural program, the Reminiscence of Reconciliation, represented a notable shift from the triumphalist, military-led Victory Day celebrations presided over by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose administration criminalised all Tamil remembrance activities.

Despite the welcome change in tone and moves to improve relations between the majority Sinhalese community and Tamils, who represent 15 per cent of the country’s population, the “national unity” government needs to redouble its efforts to promote reconciliation. In fact, much more work remains to reverse the damage done to all communities in Sri Lanka by the decade of Rajapaksa’s authoritarian rule.

Addressing the painful legacy of the war is just one aspect of an extremely ambitious agenda that includes drafting a new constitution, strengthening the rule of law and rebuilding democratic institutions. But it remains unclear how far the government is willing and able to go to tackle the hardest reforms, particularly justice for wartime abuses and greater devolution of political power to deal with the ethnic conflict.

Worryingly, the government appears to be backtracking on vital plans for transitional justice. The enormity of the crimes committed makes them impossible to ignore, yet difficult for the military, and most Sinhalese, to accept responsibility for.

Both sides committed atrocities throughout the many years of war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009. In September 2015, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights presented a detailed report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, documenting a “horrific level of violations and abuses” by government forces, pro-government paramilitaries and the separatist Tamil Tigers. The long list of crimes included indiscriminate shelling, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture and sexual violence, recruitment of children, and denial of humanitarian assistance. The report confirmed victim and survivor accounts of systematic war crimes committed during the final months and immediate aftermath of the civil war.  

The new government – brought to power by elections in January and August 2015 – was prepared for these explosive findings, and announced its ambitious reform agenda at the start of the Human Rights Council session. It agreed to the Council’s groundbreaking resolution on promoting reconciliation and accountability, which was adopted by consensus. Key commitments included the creation of a truth commission, reparations and missing persons offices and, most controversially, an independent special court for war crimes with “participation of Commonwealth and other foreign judges, defence lawyers and authorised prosecutors and investigators.”

The resolution was potentially transformative, yet the government has missed a series of deadlines for its implementation and is sending mixed messages about the overall strategy for justice and reconciliation. Doubts about the government’s political will are growing domestically and ly.

Dealing honestly with the legacy of the civil war is hard and painful work, complicated by Sri Lanka’s internecine political rivalries. President Sirisena is struggling to counter a faction of his Sri Lanka Freedom Party that remains loyal to his predecessor. Meanwhile, strains are growing within the unity government coalition.

The government is also fearful of angering the military and security services, which maintain a dangerous degree of autonomy. Recent arrests of Tamils under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act – which the government promised the United Nations it would repeal – and continued reports of the torture of detainees have sown concern about the government’s ability to rein in abuses. Many Tamils and rights activists are growing increasingly discouraged by what they see as slow progress.

Changing attitudes on all sides will be difficult. Sinhala nationalism remains entrenched within the state and society, and this in turn feeds Tamil nationalism and, for some, continued dreams of a separate state. Tamil activists, frustrated by the slow pace of reform, show little public acknowledgement of the lasting pain caused by Tamil Tiger atrocities.

Despite the deep obstacles, though, now is the best opportunity in Sri Lanka’s recent history for the country to work together to build a lasting peace. To seize the moment, the government must reinvigorate the “good governance” agenda that won it popular support in the first place.

Measures to address the war’s legacy need to be pursued and presented as an essential aspect of the broader agenda to strengthen the rule of law, end impunity and tackle corruption and abuse of power. These issues resonate across the country, from the Tamil-majority areas of the north to the Sinhalese heartland in the south. The government should launch a coordinated outreach campaign to educate communities about the value of transitional justice and its links to other reforms, while giving stronger backing to the nationwide public consultations on designing reconciliation and justice measures.

Continued support is essential to keep the reform process on track – by both building Sri Lanka’s technical capacity for reforms and reminding the government of its promises when politics threaten to win out over principle.

In the end, though, it is Sri Lankans who will lead the ongoing effort to make a more durable peace. There is no better place to start than by acknowledging the suffering and injustice experienced by all communities – and the equal right to remember and mourn. •

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Largely on the back of the Nobel laureate’s personal popularity, the NLD was always expected to do well. But with the military holding 25 per cent of seats in all national and regional parliaments, attention had focused on whether the party could secure 67 per cent of seats, giving it a “supermajority” – more than 50 per cent even after military MPs are factored in. This would enable it to select and appoint the president without the need to negotiate with other political stakeholders.

The NLD has blown that target out of the water. With a handful of constituencies left to announce, it has already won more than 80 per cent of seats – a figure eerily similar to its win in 1990, a result the generals never honoured. The scale of the victory has been devastating for many of Myanmar’s ninety-two registered parties, not least the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, or USDP, which campaigned on the record of President Thein Sein, the reformist president it put in place in 2011. The USDP parliamentary caucus has been wiped out, and almost all government ministers who contested have lost heavily.

Full voting results have not been announced; the Union Election Commission has so far given only the name and party of the winning candidate, and the number of votes they received. Yet unofficial figures from local electoral commission branches and the parties, which had members at each polling station to monitor the vote and count, reveal huge wins for the NLD. In Hlaing Tharyar, on the outskirts of Yangon, its candidates received more than five times the number of votes as their USDP rivals. Other races have been closer, yet the USDP has won just a handful of seats in areas dominated by the ethnic Bamar, its supposed conservative heartland. According to a (possibly apocryphal) report from northern Myanmar, one USDP candidate received just two votes at his local polling station – despite having six family members eligible to vote there.

In some cases the outcome has been simply embarrassing. In Naypyitaw, the capital the generals built from scratch barely a decade ago, the former defence minister, who resigned to contest the election, lost by 176 votes to a poet, Maung Tin Thit, standing for the NLD. To make matters worse, it’s the constituency of the former head of the military junta, Than Shwe, and his deputy, Maung Aye. In the end, the USDP won only one of ten national parliament seats in Naypyitaw, despite its being home to almost 100,000 civil servants and military personnel, as well as their families.

Given such strong results, why was the outcome ever in doubt? Democratic elections are so new to Myanmar that opinion polls and data on voting intentions are virtually non-existent. The few surveys conducted in recent years – by the International Republican Institute, Asia Foundation and Asian Barometer Survey – highlighted strong approval for the government and the president but also continued enthusiasm for Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD. The results also showed a respect for hierarchy and tradition, and the strong influence of religious leaders. And 53 per cent of respondents in the Asian Barometer Survey listed the economy as their top priority, above issues such as governance and social services.

These factors were all thought to play in favour of the USDP. The party had the backing of conservative Buddhist leaders and the military, either explicitly or implicitly, and during the campaign its candidates emphasised the positive changes of the past five years. Yet, in the end, the election became a referendum on authoritarianism. Voters were unwilling to consider the past five years as distinct from everything that the military had done in the fifty-three years since it seized power from a democratically elected government and introduced a socialist autarky. The historical legitimacy of the NLD, the party that won in 1990 but was denied power, was certainly affirmed. But the antipathy towards the ruling military elite was palpable; one photograph widely shared on social media shows an invalid vote cast in Shan State, with eight candidates listed. Every box has been stamped except for the USDP. (In Myanmar’s first-past-the-post system, voters need only stamp one box.)

Despite the complexities of the issues identified as important to the election – religion, the economy and ethnic affiliation, for instance – the people voted for a simple idea: change. That’s not to say they were unconcerned about the NLD’s perceived support for Muslims, or questions over the party’s ability to govern. These fears, stoked by the government and the USDP, were simply trumped by the hope for a better future and belief in Aung San Suu Kyi to deliver. In that sense, it was a hugely positive result.

The NLD campaign was extremely effective, despite criticism from observers over its message to vote for the party and ignore the candidate. “Don’t worry about the candidates,” Aung San Suu Kyi said at her rallies. “If they’re bad, we’ll pull them into line.” High-profile individuals who may have been reluctant to toe the party line – or, rather, Aung San Suu Kyi’s line – had been blocked from running for the NLD. The country’s democracy icon then reinforced the message on a punishing national tour that even took her to remote ethnic minority areas, such as conflict-hit Kayah State, on the border with Thailand. Thousands turned out at each stop. No one can agree on how many attended her last rally in Yangon, on 1 November, but the sea of red appeared close to 100,000.

Anecdotal reports suggest that some voters – perhaps a significant number – may have decided to support the NLD only at the last minute, when they were swept up in the euphoria of the moment. With no exit polling, it is impossible to know. Certainly, the result surprised the USDP, which had expected the government’s construction of roads, bridges and schools, and its offering of low-interest loans, to resonate with hip-pocket voters. The Ayeyarwady delta, the country’s rice bowl and home to Thein Sein and many other senior government officials, was thought to be one such area. As it turned out, many said they would vote USDP when the candidates visited their villages but once they got in the booth they ignored the party’s lion emblem and stamped beside the NLD’s logo, a golden peacock on a red flag. In part, they had humoured the USDP candidates out of Myanmar politeness.

This tallies with some of the findings of the Asian Barometer Survey, which comprised more than 1600 interviews conducted between May 2014 and March 2015. The response rate – those willing to undertake the survey – was 87 per cent, the highest in East Asia. But one legacy of decades of military rule is that many, particularly in rural areas, are still reluctant to discuss party politics: around half of the respondents refused to answer questions about voting intentions. Many voters obviously preferred to keep their cards close to their chest, or were still unsure how they would vote. But when asked general questions for the survey, they tended to answer. And just 4 per cent – the lowest of any Asian nation – expressed support for authoritarian government.

The NLD has also done far better in ethnic minority areas than even the most optimistic observers anticipated. Administratively, Myanmar is divided into seven regions, dominated by the ethnic Bamar majority, and seven states, one for each of the seven main ethnic groups: Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Chin, Mon, Rakhine and Shan. Only in the latter two did the NLD not win the majority of seats.

Prior to the vote, ethnic leaders had expressed concern about the impact of vote-splitting among the large number of ethnic parties. Under Myanmar’s first-past-the-post voting system, they would take votes away from each other and possibly enable the USDP or NLD to win despite local sentiment. While this was indeed a factor in some areas, preliminary figures suggest the NLD would have won in many constituencies even if there had been just a single ethnic minority party. The full voting results will no doubt give a clearer picture.

With preliminary results mostly in, the question is: what now for Myanmar? The scale of the NLD’s win and the speed with which it became evident has quickly shifted attention to the transition to a new government. On 10 November, Aung San Suu Kyi wrote to president Thein Sein, senior general Min Aung Hlaing and parliamentary speaker Shwe Mann proposing talks aimed at “national reconciliation” this coming week. They quickly accepted her offer, with the president and military commander-in-chief also congratulating her on the NLD’s victory.

These talks are important for a number of reasons. Myanmar’s constitution sets out a novel process for selecting the president, together with an unusually long transition period. Newly elected MPs will not meet until late January. One of their first orders of business will be to choose the president from among three candidates. Elected representatives in the upper and lower houses will nominate one each (the NLD, thanks to its overwhelming victory, will get to choose both). A third will be chosen by the commander-in-chief through the military’s parliamentary bloc. All representatives, elected and military, will then gather to choose the president from among these three candidates, with the two losers becoming vice-presidents. The NLD-backed president will then appoint a cabinet, but will not assume office until the end of March – four-and-a-half months from now.

In the meantime, the current parliament – whose members were mostly wiped out in the election – will meet on 16 November. Its agenda has been kept largely under wraps. Aung San Suu Kyi has instructed as many as possible of her MPs-elect to get to the capital to observe the session and learn about the parliamentary process.

Myanmar’s peace process is also moving forward, following the signing of a nationwide ceasefire accord on 15 October after two years of negotiations. The agreement was nationwide in name only – eight groups signed on but around another dozen, mostly those strung out along the border with China, refused. Their decision was driven in part by a desire not to give the government and USDP a boost in its re-election campaign. Political negotiations with the eight signatories are scheduled to start by 15 January, with a framework for political talks to be agreed a month before they begin. At the same time, Myanmar’s military is engaged in heavy fighting with one of the non-signatories, the Shan State Army–North, exacerbating tensions further.

But the question of the presidency is central. As many have already noted, the constitution bars Aung San Suu Kyi from the position because her sons hold foreign passports. In June and July of this year, the military used its parliamentary veto to block sweeping changes to the constitution proposed by parliament. An amendment to the “Aung San Suu Kyi clause” – section 59(f) – was not even put to a vote. The military has made clear that the constitution is not set in stone, but section 59(f) is one of several red lines it will not cross.

Aung San Suu Kyi has responded in recent weeks by pledging to install a puppet leader, and declared she would be “above the president” – dangerous rhetoric, and a position that some of her opponents have already declared unconstitutional. It remains unclear whom she will choose; most likely, she has not yet made a decision. There would be no sense in committing so early, and there are no obvious candidates. Managing such an unusual arrangement, with a president granted wide-ranging powers by the constitution essentially subservient to an elected MP, will require deft footwork from the NLD leader.

In such a potentially volatile environment, negotiations as to how to manage the next four months are essential. The speed with which Aung San Suu Kyi’s offer for talks was accepted is heartening. It is important that all four leaders who gather in Naypyitaw this week maintain a constructive relationship, particularly Aung San Suu Kyi and Min Aung Hlaing, who will retain their status beyond March 2016.

Despite the NLD’s election win, the military still holds many keys to the kingdom. These are enshrined in the constitution that it painstakingly drafted over the course of fifteen years and had approved in 2008 at a sham referendum. The military’s 25 per cent of seats in parliament gives it the power to block constitutional reform, and it also controls three key government ministries. The ability to choose one vice-president also gives it a majority on the powerful National Defence and Security Council, which effectively sits above cabinet.

A poor relationship with the military will hamper Aung San Suu Kyi’s ability to govern the country. Already, the scale of the challenge she and her party face is daunting. Expectations are sky-high, with “an almost religious belief that instantly life will be better,” as one journalist put it to me. With their parliamentary presence largely gone, ethnic minority political leaders – not to mention ethnic armed groups – will no doubt fear a continuation of the strict centralism that characterised military rule and eased only slightly under Thein Sein.

In recent years the government’s reforms have been slowed by the low capacity of the civil service, with a small number of qualified people bearing an impossibly heavy burden. This challenge will not disappear overnight. There is also simply not yet enough money in government coffers to do much that the NLD, and the people, would like, particularly in health and education. Reducing corruption and convincing businesses, in particular, to pay more tax will be absolutely essential, yet far from easy.

But there is much to be optimistic about. The graciousness with which the USDP conceded defeat and congratulated the NLD on its victory – effectively drawing a curtain on five decades of military-backed rule – has surprised many. While the military strongly supported the USDP, constitutional safeguards mean there is little incentive to stage a coup. It will also be confident that, in five years’ time, some voters will defect back to conservative or ethnic political forces. But the NLD should be carried along on a tide of public goodwill for some time yet, including in the civil service. It will also begin in a much stronger position than Thein Sein’s five years ago, thanks to his government’s reforms, particularly on the economic front.

Finally, there was one other winner on 8 November: the Union Election Commission. For years, the distrust between the opposition and the commission has been palpable, largely because its outspoken chair, Tin Aye, is a former general and USDP member. Even shortly after the vote, senior NLD officials were warning that the slow release of official results might reflect commission efforts to amend the result. There were, of course, some isolated problems on election day, particularly with eligible voters not being on the electoral roll, and the commission’s public messaging could certainly have been better. But the many doubts expressed about the commission’s impartiality and its ability to manage the election have largely been proven wrong. That such a high-stakes vote could be held with little violence or attempts to manipulate the outcome is an incredible feat.

From a position of mutual distrust, the commission was able to draft enduring codes of conduct for political parties and electoral observers, together with dramatically improved voter rolls. In addition to voting, thousands of people also gained experience of the political process, acting as formal or informal election observers in polling stations during the day. The election, therefore, has bequeathed Myanmar an incipient trust in its electoral system and those who run it. This will be essential for future elections.

The people of Myanmar have spoken, and done so decisively. Now all eyes are on Aung San Suu Kyi, president Thein Sein and senior general Min Aung Hlaing and their moves this week. •

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THE expatriate Canadian intellectual Michael Ignatieff was always being asked to do things: write articles for high-profile magazines, give speeches at prestigious universities, appear in the media to explain the complexities of the world. Then, one day in October 2004, three heavyweights from Canada’s Liberal Party took him out to dinner at a restaurant near Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he was teaching a course in human rights, and asked him – in effect – to become prime minister of his homeland, a country he hadn’t lived in for thirty years.

Ignatieff gave it some thought – oh, at least a weekend, it seems - and then said yes, and over the next seven years, in quick succession, he was found a safe seat (or “riding,” as the Canadians call them) in Toronto; had a tilt at the leadership of his party and failed; had another go and succeeded; and then had a chance to form a coalition government with Canada’s small left-wing party, the NDP, but chose not to.

And that’s as close as he ever got to fulfilling the hopes of the three wise men who had journeyed south to anoint him. In 2011 he was crucified by the Canadian voters; under his leadership, the once-mighty Liberal Party suffered the most savage election defeat in its history. Ignatieff even lost his own riding. It was the democratic equivalent of being strung up from the proverbial lamppost.

Many Canadians never warmed to Ignatieff. The fact that he had left the country as a young man and never really come back, except in order to become prime minister, was manna from heaven for his opponents. They composed some of the most devastating attack ads ever aired: “Michael Ignatieff – Just Visiting” and “Michael Ignatieff – He Didn’t Come Home for You.”

He and his backers should have seen it coming, but they didn’t. Everyone remembers how the Prodigal Son is embraced by his estranged father; everyone forgets that the other son – the one who stayed on the farm – never forgives his wastrel brother.

Ignatieff tells the story of his recruitment into politics on the very first page of Fire and Ashes. It is not until page 168 – and seven years later – that he has an epiphany as he thinks about the Canadians who did support him. “I’d finally worked out whom I was doing politics for,” he writes. Just a little late, don’t you think? Looking back, he admits that his quixotic decision was driven by hubris and self-regard. What he doesn’t fully admit is how woefully unprepared he was for life as a politician.

That’s the most extraordinary aspect of Fire and Ashes: the fact that this highly educated, apparently worldly man failed to anticipate the ugly onslaught of political life. The book reads as if Ignatieff – the patrician, idealistic scholar – had never before contemplated the political process in all its bloody mayhem. Couldn’t he have learned just a little about political life from his library? He’s obviously read Machiavelli, Cicero and Tolstoy, but obviously he wasn’t reading them properly.

At one point late in the piece one of his friends tries to soften the blow of the stunning electoral loss by saying, “At least you’ll get a book out of this.” Ignatieff is angered by the idea. He didn’t do politics to write politics. In the end, though, this book might be the only lasting legacy of his political career.

Fire and Ashes is very good on the texture of political life. Ignatieff recalls, for example, that when he became a politician, “I had never been so well dressed in my life and had never felt so hollow.” The private man had been taken hostage by the public image. Every encounter, every gesture, every utterance was now political. It’s a tough vocation.

“There are no techniques in politics,” he realises in the end. “It is not a science but a charismatic art, dependent on skills of persuasion, oratory and bloody-minded perseverance, all of which can be learned in life but none of which can be taught in a classroom…”

Political history is littered with thinkers and theorists who tried out for democratic politics but failed to make the grade, Ignatieff writes – and, never afraid of inviting comparisons, he cites Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill and Max Weber. So where do you find the men and women best suited to submitting themselves to the whirlpool – the constant scrutiny and the real and manufactured crises – that modern democratic politics has become? After all, as the Cambridge political scientist David Runciman reminds us in The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War 1 to the Present, crises – and how politicians handle them – are the very essence of democracy.

Runciman’s book is made up of a series of fascinating and elegantly written case studies of the democracies in action – or inaction, as the case may be. He writes how the victorious democracies stuffed up the settlement of the first world war in 1918. How they failed to cope with the rise of fascism in 1933. How the cold war got invented in 1947. How the world danced along the edge of the nuclear abyss in 1962, but never quite lost its footing. How stagflation in 1974 almost derailed the world economy. How the sudden collapse of communism in 1989 was handled. And how the financial crisis in 2008 brought capitalism to its knees but didn’t quite knock it to the canvas.

According to Runciman, democracy’s strengths are also its weaknesses. If it is flexible, it is also impulsive; if it is responsive, it is also addicted to the short term. “The successes of democracy over the past hundred years have not resulted in more mature, far-sighted and self-aware democratic societies,” he writes. “Democracy has triumphed, but it has not grown up.”

Forever young, democracy will forever be in peril, susceptible to making the same mistakes again and again, but always – so far – capable of muddling through to another day. Democracies – like gifted Canadian intellectuals drawn to politics, perhaps – can overreach themselves, fail to learn the lessons of the past, and blunder into one crisis too many. She’ll be right, mate, until she isn’t.

Runciman is laudably, and understandably, pro-democracy but he’s also keen to alert us to its faults and challenges. In the past decade alone, he argues, democracies have “fought unsuccessful wars, mismanaged their finances, failed to take meaningful action of climate change, and seemed frozen in the face of China’s growing power.”

If democracy really is the worst form of government except for all the others, then it must last a very long time indeed. At least until the system of mutually assured destruction breaks down, the Sun burns out and collapses or we manage to make the Earth uninhabitable. Runciman is right to worry that there might be a crisis just around the corner that democracy, gripped in the confidence trap, won’t manage to muddle through.

Politicians and politics always seem to get a bad press – mainly from the sort of people you would never want anywhere near a P&C meeting, let alone federal cabinet. But someone has to be willing to get elected, if only to deal with all the potentially life-threatening crises our species just can’t seem to live without. •

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THE contrast between unfolding political dramas in Burma and China this year has been striking: on one side of the border, democracy and hope; on the other, corruption, murder, and crackdowns on the internet. In the middle of April, a Chinese netizen went online to ask why China seemed incapable of producing a Gandhi or an Aung San Suu Kyi. The question was addressed to Yu Jianrong, famously outspoken professor of rural development in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who responded dryly that it might better be put to the Central Organization Department. (That department is responsible for keeping the eighty million members of the Chinese Communist Party gainfully employed in running the country.)

As it happened, while Aung San Suu Kyi was out on the campaign trail re-introducing democracy in Burma, Yu Jianrong himself was engaged in drawing up a plan for how to achieve democracy in China. The result was reported briefly in the Western press in late March, not long before the Bo Xilai case began to take up all available room in the media. In a single-page document, posted on the internet as a photo image, Yu set out the steps for a staged transition to constitutional democracy over the next ten years. On 19 April, around six weeks later, the Guangzhou-based current affairs magazine Shidai Zhoukan (Time Weekly) published a long interview with him on this topic, marking the first mention of the document in the Chinese print media.

Yu’s ten-year plan is worth comparing with another online call for constitutional democracy, Charter 08, which in 2009 led to the arrest and imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo. While the fundamental similarities between the two show that he is sailing close to the wind, Yu’s carefully constructed document ultimately stays within the limits of the agenda for change set by Premier Wen Jiabao at the National People’s Congress earlier this year. Charter 08 contains an ambit claim: freedom, equality, human rights, a new constitution, separation of powers, protection for the environment, the whole shebang. Yu’s plan itemises measures necessary to achieve social justice in the first phase of reform (2012–15), and to implement political reforms in the second. His priorities in social justice are clear: rural land rights, social welfare and the reform of the urban–rural household registration system. A second tranch of projected reforms, to the judicial system, would lead to the abolition of the petitioning system and of “education through labour” camps. Only then does he get to free speech. It might be concluded that he has put someone else’s problems ahead of his own.

Interviewed for the New York Times, Liu Yu of Tsinghua University criticised the ten-year plan as “unrealistic,” comparing it unfavourably with approaches in the West where intellectuals “make proposals on specific things,” rather than developing blueprints for the whole country. But it doesn’t require a very close reading of this plan to recognise Yu’s trademark concerns: rural land grabs by local officials; entrenched inequalities resulting from the urban–rural household registration system; and the gross mistreatment of petitioners – people who, for want of other means, seek redress for injustices by appealing to the authorities, and end up in prison, hospital, sometimes even the morgue, for their pains.

It is these issues that have made Yu Jianrong a familiar figure on the virtual horizon in recent years. He is less a democracy activist than a rights activist. Blunt, tenacious and generous, he is well known to at least two types of audience in China. One consists of officials, especially officials at the county level, to whom he often delivers lectures. A professor from the Rural Development Research Institute in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is a sought-after commodity for training purposes, and he gets lots of invitations. The second audience, which must include much of the first, is composed of netizens.

Yu Jianrong is not quite up there with the renowned Han Han as a blogger, but his website began hotting up in November 2010 after he posted a comment concerning an encounter with an official in Wanzai county, Jiangxi province. The official had taken exception to comments made by Yu about unlawful demolitions. Online, Yu quoted him as saying: “No demolition, no development. If we officials don’t demolish, what will you intellectuals eat?” A couple of journalists keeping track of blog traffic subsequently reported that the sentence had been re-posted 3000 times within twenty-two hours, eliciting 2000 new strings of commentary.

Wanzai is an agrarian county in the middle of China which it had done well out of rural commercialisation in the 1980s but was left behind during the “get rich is glorious” nineties. Yu had done some homework before he went there, and knew the range of problems he would find there. Rural problems, in his view, can all be traced to the absence of property title, which leaves rural communities helpless in face of local officials colluding with big business to take over their land. Rising conflicts in the countryside are a result, as is a stream of petitioners to Beijing.

On the latter subject, Yu’s due diligence uncovered an unsavoury figure in the person of the party secretary of Wanzai, one Chen Xiaoping (who has since been promoted to a position elsewhere). Chen was on record as having a three strikes policy for petitioners, who are typically peasants heading off to Beijing to complain about local officials: first “offenders” were to be reprimanded and fined; second offenders were to be remanded; third offenders were to be re-educated through labour. This story elucidates the close connection in Yu’s ten-year plan between the petition system and re-education through labour.

Wanzai is not the poorest county in Jiangxi, but like most rural areas it sends large numbers of its young people as migrant labourers to major urban centers. This phenomenon underpins another of Yu Jianrong’s concerns: access by rural migrants to education, health, insurance, and rights in general. The disadvantage of rural migrants in this respect is a legacy of the household registration system, introduced in the late fifties. At that time, urban registration meant access to grain and cotton rations coupons. These were resources which country people were meant to supply for themselves. But it meant, for instance, that during the famine of 1959–61 peasants making their way into the towns were unable to buy grain there, and starved anyway.

The coupon system has long since gone, but there remains a sharp difference between urban and rural people to education and health care entitlements, both because these services are poorly funded in the countryside and because access to well-funded resources in the towns is extremely costly for anyone who is not registered there. The children of rural migrant workers in Beijing, for example, have no natural right to education at a local school. Migrant workers who can pay for a good education for their child here will find all their best efforts to secure a city education frustrated in the end because the child will have to sit for matriculation in the area where the family is registered. For this reason, Yu’s ten-year plan links education to the issue of household registration.

AN INTERVIEW conducted by Taiwanese researcher Chen Yizhong last year shed some light on Yu’s engagement with such issues. The son of a communist party member and minor local official, he was four years old when his father was “struggled into the ground” during the Cultural Revolution. The family was stripped of its precious city registration, and was unable to secure registration in the countryside either. For around eight years, his mother fed her children by foraging. His father was rehabilitated in 1977, but died shortly afterwards. He and his sister travelled “everywhere,” he recalls, petitioning on their mother’s behalf for recognition and compensation for the family’s sufferings. His personal story took a turn for the better when he gained entry to university through competitive exam in 1979.

Such stories are common among the families of officials and intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution, but they do not often produce champions of the poor. One thing that stands out in Yu’s particular saga is the family’s loss of registration papers, which in the bizarre world of revolutionary bureaucracy left them as non-people (fei min), like animals scavenging for a living. He describes the driving intellectual interest of his early years as lying in this problem: understanding the process by which people could become non-people. Disenabling this process is not on the timeline of his ten-year plan, but it would surely be among the effects of its implementation. •

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THAT Václav Havel and Kim Jong Il died within twenty-four hours of each other is one of the sharper ironies of political history. It is also an oddly fitting reflection of Havel’s dramaturgical interest in the structure and sequence of public events, though he would certainly have objected to the simplistic moral polarity in the allocation of roles: Prague’s Prince of Light versus Pyongyang’s Prince of Darkness. As various forms of this narrative proliferated in media commentary, Gareth Evans called for some moderation. We should avoid the tendency to pillory or to sanctify political leaders, he says. The task is rather “to reconcile what they will often see as hopelessly competing demands of moral values and national interests, and to find ways to get them to do more good and less harm.”

For Havel, though, the focus was not on the leaders. In the Velvet Revolution that saw Czechoslovakia liberated from communist dictatorship in 1989 it was the people who were the agents of change, and Havel’s consciousness of that didn’t diminish during his time as president of the new Czech Republic. Throughout his long career as an international statesman he maintained the view that the people are ultimately responsible for the political climate in which they live.

During the funeral ceremonies held in Pyongyang and Prague, it was the people who were on show, and the polarities were overwhelmingly evident. In one city, mourners in camera-ready groups performed extravagant displays of grief as the giant portrait of the Dear Leader passed by at the head of the cortege. In the other, a spontaneous gathering of citizens, composed in their demeanour, formed small enclaves around communal arrangements of candles, flowers and photographs. Two kinds of theatre: an over-acted charade, and an improvisation expressive of complex and various human responses.

Havel was the figurehead of a revolution that manifested itself not as a change in leadership but through a comprehensive transformation in civic life. It had its beginnings in the Charter 77 declaration, issued in January 1977 by a loose confederation of Czech dissidents who held in common “the feeling of co-responsibility, faith in the idea of civic involvement and the will to exercise it and the common need to seek new and more effective means for its expression.” The signatories, led by Havel and the distinguished philosopher Jan Patočka, paid the price in the crackdown that followed. Patočka died two months later following an eleven-hour police interrogation. There is nothing bland in this interpretation of civic responsibility: the stakes are the highest, for the individual and the nation.

Havel’s sustained attempt to articulate this responsibility in “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay published in 1978, preceded his own longest term of imprisonment – four and a half years, during which he developed health problems from which he suffered for the rest of his life. But what the essay communicates is an urgent conviction that the penalties for not speaking out are wider and, ultimately, more miserable. Beginning with the greengrocer who puts a propaganda slogan in his window, the scenario pans out to depict an all-encompassing regime of falsehood. Propaganda infects the language of public and social communication, and is then internalised to influence the very process of thought formation and to control expressive behaviour. Moral instincts are inverted, the legislature is perverted and there is a radical contortion of the whole cognitive apparatus by which we judge what is and what is not.

This portrayal of life in a system “thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies” owes much to the philosophy of Patočka, to whom the essay is dedicated; Havel’s own perspectives were those of a dramatist. He wrote a number of widely influential plays during his early adulthood, and although his public duties as president prevented him from returning to the theatre, he continued to present a dramaturgical view of events.

With a playwright’s instinct for the impact of human speech, he shared with Patočka a truly Orwellian view of how the systemic perversion of language poisons the conditions of being. Speaking the truth may carry penalties, but living the lie is an abdication of everything that makes us alive as intelligent, sentient beings. Seen in this way, the phenomenon of the totalitarian regime is more about consensual delusion on the part of the people than about the dictates of any state leader.

The regime that is “captive to its own lies” requires the cooperation of all the individuals within it, and must, in turn, maintain vigilant control over them. The potential for crisis is ever present, because without the binding principle of a totalising world view the structure would undergo an atomic disintegration. In a domain of controlled appearances, it is all or nothing. The story of the emperor’s new clothes may have become a little hackneyed in more recent rhetorical skirmishes, but it is here invoked, with freshness and force, as the ultimate political speech-act.

A central part of Havel’s analysis is that postwar Europe has passed beyond the era of classical dictatorship into one in which the regime itself holds sway, as a technology of power that turns human subjects into its automatons. But beneath the ordered surface of the regime, “there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims.” For the subjects of the contemporary totalitarian state, an awakening to their own freedom takes the form of a crisis in the conditions of existence – “an existential revolution,” as Havel terms it in the final section of the essay. In coining this term, he gives a significant twist to the philosophical notion of existential crisis as a shock wave in the inner life of the individual, when the foundations of being are rocked by a piercing insight into the inauthenticity of life in the objective world.

Patočka sought to reinterpret existential insight as a phenomenon with collective and political implications, associating it with a form of consciousness compelled to affirm its freedom and responsibility for the conditions of life. Havel took the reinterpretation a step further. When the crisis becomes a revolution, it is a dramatic rather than a philosophical concept, something belonging to the world of events, a shared reality and a transformative actuality. At the same time, he introduced to the sphere of political rhetoric a proposition that carried metaphysical significance.

The call for an existential revolution was a call to action based on collective mental transformation, and it was inspired as much by Havel’s favourite rock groups as it was by Patočka’s ideas. There is an extent to which this vision meshes with that of the 1960s cultural revolution. Frank Zappa and Lou’s Reed’s Velvet Underground were potent influences on the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and Zappa’s scathing evocations of “plastic people” were taken up by Havel’s favourite Czech rock group, The Plastic People of the Universe. In the early 1990s, Zappa even served for a time with Havel’s administration as an official cultural ambassador.

Havel had an extraordinary capacity for bridging cultural worlds: introducing counter-cultural rock influences into his approach to international affairs; converting abstract philosophical concepts into transformative dramatic principles; bringing the mentality of a dissenter to diplomatic exchanges. These converging dynamics underlie his call for an existential revolution, which he reiterated in an address to international leaders assembled for Forum 2000, a conference he hosted in Prague in September 1997 to discuss “the fate and future of our common civilisation.”

In the face of massive inequities in the international distribution of wealth and the devastating consequences of ecological destruction, he said, “It is my deep conviction that the only option is for something to change in the sphere of the spirit, in the sphere of human conscience, in the actual attitude of man towards the world and his understanding of himself and his place in the overall order of existence.” Perhaps he risked over-pitching the message, but this was not the talk of a naïve idealist. As a veteran of a revolution successfully accomplished, Havel spoke with a tempered sense of the conditions of possibility.

With the subsequent escalation of ecological and economic crises, others began to adopt his rhetoric. Ban Ki-Moon issued a statement in 2009 describing climate change as “the one truly existential threat” to human populations around the globe. In the past couple of years, the term “existential” has gone viral. It is used routinely in commentary on climate change, and on the current European economic meltdown. French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe recently declared that the whole eurozone is in existential crisis.

Havel’s call for a shift in the register of consciousness is starting to look more and more like common sense. If it brings with it a shift to the front foot, from passively experienced crisis to an actively generated revolution in communal perception and understanding, this may indeed be the only way forward. What does it take to trigger this shift? How much cognitive turbulence can we sustain before we actually start unhitching ourselves from hard-wired dependencies on outmoded economic logic? And surely it’s time to ask: with all we’ve had going for us in the prosperous democratic regions of the world, how did we come to this pass?

In “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel warns against any form of politics that offers a simplified view of the world. “One pays dearly for this low-rent home,” he writes. It’s a curious image, resonating, as it does now, with the mortgage crisis that has struck middle America. The low-rent home as a mental residence, though, carries more fundamental risks. A form of democratic politics that is conducted through the tabloid press, focus groups and opinion polls is one that ultimately fails democracy. An electorate dominated by resentment and punitive impulses can easily vote its way back into totalitarianism. This may have already happened in Hungary, and it doesn’t take much stretch of the imagination to envisage a dictatorial right-wing turn in American politics.

Havel spoke always from a conviction that civic intelligence is the most valuable commodity in any nation, and its erosion is the greatest danger. He was Orwell’s true successor, the political prophet of his era, gifted with a kind of visionary realism that will continue to resonate long after his death. •

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THERE ARE some shocks in John Keane’s latest book, The Life and Death of Democracy. First, he punctures the “democracy started in Athens” myth – “assembly democracy,” he writes, was practised much earlier and further east. But a bigger jolt comes from his thesis that democracy did not emerge as an historical inevitability. It was an invention at a certain time and place, not a natural state of human power-sharing. And its survival as a system of government in the twenty-first century is far from secure.

John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster and the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin. He took part in a debate, “Does Democracy Have a Future?”, at the 2009 Melbourne Writer’s Festival, where Peter Clarke spoke with him about democracy’s surprising past, challenging present and uncertain future.

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A CENTURY AGO the bright new Commonwealth of Australia was regarded as a social laboratory of democracy, leading the way for universal suffrage, a fair, equal and just society and civil rights. But how democratic is Australia now?

This is what we at the Democratic Audit of Australia set out to investigate, analysing data over a period of years from all Australian jurisdictions and testing what we found against four internationally accepted principles adopted by the Stockholm-based IDEA, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance: political quality, popular control of government, civil liberties and human rights, and the quality and extent of public debate and discussion.

The report card is mixed: sound in many respects but disappointingly lagging in others. In a word: Australia could do better. What comes through the whole project is the extent to which we take our democratic values for granted but all too often fail to realise their fragility and the gradual erosion of their substance.

For example, on any scale at all, Australia is one of the wealthiest of nations, and also one in which its citizens enjoy a high degree of contentment. The 2007 Human Development Index compiled by the United Nations ranks countries on the basis of key indicators such as life expectancy, literacy, education and per capita GDP. Australia scores well across the board, coming in third behind Iceland and Norway and just ahead of Canada in fourth place. Other comparable countries are well down the list – the United States (twelfth), the United Kingdom (sixteenth) and New Zealand (nineteenth).

But behind the statistics are troubling clouds. The ultra-rosy picture of employment masks a grimmer reality, as the definition of employed is anyone who has worked at least one hour of paid employment in the preceding week, quite overlooking the rapid growth in casual and part-time employment and its attendant insecurity. The appalling life expectancy of Indigenous Australians – seventeen years less than for non-Indigenous – and the growing extent of homelessness are but two of the other serious blemishes that call into question just how inclusive we are as a society.

Inclusiveness is difficult to measure, but it nevertheless remains an important indicator of our collective democratic health, notably in regard to the state of political equality and its implications for social cohesion. There is clearly a broad commitment to the idea of equal citizenship, but the practice does not always reflect this. For example, gender can (and does) affect the practical day-to-day experience of citizenship, just as ethnicity and race do. It is only a few decades since the time when Indigenous Australians or women forfeited their Australian citizenship if they married a “foreigner.” In contrast to Britain, Australia’s citizenship legislation, enacted in 1948, did not set out the rights and obligations attached to citizenship; rather, these were left to be determined by the complexity of other legislative provisions that continue to discriminate on the basis of citizenship, the 2007 Australian Citizenship Act notwithstanding.

Despite the well-entrenched system of compulsory voting, it is a little known fact that only some 84 per cent of the eligible adult population is enrolled to vote – a situation due not only to problems with youth enrolment but also to the number of permanent residents who are not citizens and are excluded from voting. Permanent residents also experience different rights in different states when they try to vote in local government elections.

Australia scores comparatively well in regard to the rule of law and access to justice, but again a closer examination reveals flaws and shortcomings. In general, the rule of law is respected and operates widely across the country. A positive democratic trend can be seen in the gradual spread of judicial review of both administrative decisions and actions by government, but the process has often failed those fleeing persecution and seeking asylum in Australia.

Australia has frequently been found in breach of its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by arbitrarily detaining asylum seekers, a policy introduced by the Keating government in 1992. Australia also avoided its obligations under the UN Refugee Convention between 2001 and 2005 when the Commonwealth amended the Migration Act to remove areas from declared immigration zone, with the result that asylum seekers landing in excised areas would no longer have claim to asylum.

Inequalities in the legal system are also apparent in the way prisoners are treated. For example, the system is not geared to the needs of women who, while a small minority, are rising proportionally in relation to men. Women’s prisons are fewer and as a result women often have to serve custodial sentences further from home. Indigenous Australians also fare very poorly under the existing system, comprising just on 2.4 per cent of the general population but 24 per cent of the prison population.

For many decades Australia was at the forefront of advances in conferring and protecting the economic and social rights of its citizens. But much of the achievement of these rights came through a unique centralised and quasi-judicial system of determining wages and conditions, so the dismantling of this system has effectively eroded many of those rights. Such rights have become vulnerable in the context of the decentralisation of wage bargaining, the attrition of the award system and sharp increases in non-standard employment, such as casualisation.

In such an outwardly affluent society, the prevalence of poverty and deprivation remains a real concern. In the ten years from 1997, the Commonwealth reduced its share of housing funding by 25 per cent and state governments made matching cuts as a result. With the switch of policy focus from providing public housing to subsidising rents in the private sector, which have in no way kept pace with soaring rentals, especially in Perth, more and more people have been excluded. The economic boom in Western Australia was accompanied by a rise in homelessness, with sixty-eight out of every 10,000 West Australians estimated to be homeless in 2006, compared to a national rate of fifty-three out of 10,000. Unaffordable rents have impacted particularly severely on groups such as single parents, 87 per cent of whom are women, and of all groups single women pay the highest proportion of their income on rent.

In terms of corruption, Australia fares better than most countries, but the AWB affair hurt its reputation badly, causing a slip from near the top of the table to equal ninth in the corruption perceptions index compiled annually by Transparency International. While the Commonwealth performs reasonably well, the record at state level is far from unblemished, with two former premiers of Western Australia, and former ministers in Queensland and Western Australia imprisoned for corruption over the past two decades.

In terms of public deliberation, Australia scores some major positives with the existence of two independent, publicly funded national broadcasters, a news media that is generally free, greater uniformity in formerly inhibiting defamation laws and a welcome self-scrutiny by the media industry in such forums as the ABC’s Media Watch. On the debit side, though, there is the abnormally high concentration of media ownership, the political and financial pressures on public broadcasters, tighter restrictions on news reporting through draconian anti-terror laws, lack of protection for journalists who protect their sources and generally inadequate and ineffectual freedom of information laws.

While we have free and fair elections that are the envy of much of the developing world, the extent of genuine popular control of government is questionable. For example, the lack of public support for privatisation of public enterprises has not deterred governments of all persuasions from selling off public assets. Similarly, there are real questions about accountability of governments to parliament and to the people, with the clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, noting just last week that Australian parliaments were among the weakest in the democratic world in this regard.

Overall, it’s not an entirely bleak picture, but we are nowhere near as good as we like to think we are, and arguably we have slipped from what we were a century ago. •

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IN 1975, in the midst of the energy crisis, a powerful organisation called the Trilateral Commission, set up by American banking interests and made up of representatives of big business and government in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, published a report commissioned from three eminent political scientists called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. Its key theme was that democracies had become ungovernable, that governments were suffering from an overload of both decision-making and expectations. In short, there was too much democracy, too much regulation, too much welfare.

Helped along by radical economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, this was the thinking seized on by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and used to dismantle much of the post-war Keynesian safety net. (John Howard in Australia was a later, though no less ardent, disciple.) The object of the exercise was to create a global market – an American global market, which we now call globalisation – under which much of the world slipped back into laissez-faire economics thinly disguised as deregulation.

Three decades later, unfettered capitalism has been discredited once again. But it could have been far worse if those associated with one of Australia’s most stridently pro-business think tanks, the ironically named Institute of Public Affairs, had had its way more often. Behind its very establishment address at 410 Collins Street, in Melbourne’s commercial heartland, lies political extremism in a smart suit and tie: the ideological headquarters of cowboy capitalism.

Under the banner of “free people, free society” the IPA has exerted significant influence on Australian political and social life for more than six decades. It was the driving organisational and ideological force behind the formation of the Liberal Party and the architect of a massive stream of propaganda that sought, successfully, to discredit Australia’s very moderate Labor Party as a socialist tiger waiting to pounce once the war had ended.

The IPA is, of course, concerned with private rather than public affairs, its extreme neo-liberalism and deification of the so-called free market displaying a thoroughgoing contempt for anything public: public ownership, public service, public transport and, indeed, the public itself. It is the ideological mouthpiece of very private enterprise that likes to glorify in the name of “free” enterprise.

Leaving aside the vexed question of whether liberty really does reside in a system that confers economic rights on a tiny, unaccountable, property-owning few over the powerless many, the IPA might have been expected in the current crisis to tone down its rhetoric. Not so. It is as ebullient as ever, and its executive director, John Roskam, is busily building branch support for a crack at a safe Liberal seat in Melbourne.

The latest issue of IPA Review carries a full-page house promotion, featuring a graphic of the mythical monster, and the accompanying headline: LEVIATHAN IS BACK. But who is Leviathan? Many of us, and possibly most, might well regard the uncontrollable rampant beast of that name as the representation of the globalised private sector rather than the elected governments who should (but seldom do) regulate in a way that benefits the many, not the few. (In 2004 the respected Australian Election Study showed almost one-third of those surveyed feared the power of big business, far ahead of any fear of government or unions.)

In its exhortation to “reject the State-Monster” and support the IPA (“the most concrete way you can support limited government and individual freedom in Australia”), it is evident that the spirit of cowboy capitalism is far from spent. The organisation warns of an emissions trading scheme “set to raise the price of everything.” Well, yes, the free use of the people’s environment for private exploitation and profit is simply unsustainable. The jibe of “environmentalists pushing bad science at the highest levels of government” is scarcely disguised climate change denial.

The IPA also opposes “wasteful government programs like GroceryChoice being proposed at every opportunity.” It has been a consistent critic of consumer protection measures, seeing in them an illegitimate trespass by the state on private matters. Only a strong state can protect the public interest; the IPA’s constant harping about reducing the size of the state is really aimed at reducing the capacity to protect.

Industrial relations changes are seen as “handing power back to militant unions,” quite ignoring the fact that unions never had real power, that they are representative of far more people than the IPA and its employer cronies, and that union militancy is dormant, if not extinct. And the IPA also opposes “taxpayer’s (sic) money being used to bail out failed firms.” This is, of course, the economic Darwinism of neoliberalism talking: failed firms have social consequences for displaced employees, whom failed employers happily abandon. Perhaps it is time to rethink this policy of bailouts and give displaced workers the option of taking over and running the failed firms.

Unsurprisingly, the IPA is also opposed to governments bringing in budget deficits. There is an enormous hypocrisy at work here that is also reflected in the Liberal Party’s blustering and posturing: the much-vaunted reduction in public debt during the Howard years, much of it financed from selling off the people’s assets, was not so much a case of good economic housekeeping as a transfer of public debt to private debt.

But the most problematic – and dangerous – aspect of the IPA is its utter contempt for even the most basic democratic rights. It has waged a relentless war against non-government organisations, themselves a response to the shrunken public sphere under neoliberal assault. In this it reflects the Trilateral Commission’s view of democratic processes. Crisis of Democracy spelled out quite clearly the need for the public to be discouraged from political activism: “The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

According to the report, a crisis of democracy can occur when the populace becomes too well-informed about the true goals and motivations of its rulers and begins to demand that those in power shift their focus from self-aggrandisement to providing for the people’s common needs. After all, “order depends on somehow compelling newly mobilised strata to return to a measure of passivity and defeatism... At least temporarily the maintenance of order requires a lowering of newly acquired aspirations and levels of political activity.”

This accords with the IPA’s feeble and passive definition of democracy, courtesy of former Keating government minister, Gary Johns. Dr Johns, who has led the ideological attack on NGOs, wrote: “Our attitude is shaped by our conception of democracy, which is at odds with the current fashion for participatory democracy… Participation merely crowds the field with agents (for example, non-government organisations) who may or may not provide solutions to those issues that require government action… The IPA argues that the strength and role of NGOs may give the appearance of an active democracy, but it is in reality a sign of an active citizenship.”

The IPA joined with the American Enterprise Institute in 2003 to “debate NGO influence and accountability” at a conference in Washington, an event publicised with the breathtaking claim that “the extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the potential to undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies…” In fact, corporations, whose donations keep the IPA and AEI afloat, have done more to undermine national sovereignty than any humble NGO could ever dream of.

The neoliberal experiment has cut a swathe through society over the past three decades, setting back popular sovereignty, further removing people from decision-making and engendering a critical disenchantment in, and detachment from, the political process. It has led us to the point of global crisis, greater hardship and considerable uncertainty. The doctrines that have inspired it – those preached by the IPA – have effectively seized the public space and stifled real debate and deliberation; as such they represent the gravest threat to popular democracy.

This, more than anything, is the toxin in the body politic. The only antidote is greater awareness of the essentially anti-public nature of this doctrine and more, not less, citizen involvement in the political process. The alternative to be consume, be silent and die. •

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THE RUINS of Kabul’s Darul Aman Palace stand as stark testimony to the conflicts that have torn Afghanistan apart over the past fifty years. Built in the 1920s by King Amanullah Khan, the Palace reflected a desire to westernise and modernise the country along democratic principles. But it has been gutted by fire, and bombed and shelled as part of communist uprisings and civil war. More recently the Palace, which occupies an imposing position on the southern edge of Kabul city, has been used as an observation post by NATO troops.

Like plans to restore the Palace as a home for the national parliament, which appear to have stalled due to a lack of foreign investment, Afghanistan itself stands at the crossroads. In one direction lies a country based on democratic institutions, support and a steadily developing economy. In the other direction lies a return to the past, with conflict based on religious ideology and ethnic divisions. Are Afghanistan’s democratic institutions strong enough to support the first alternative, a transition to a more free and tolerant society?

The fragility of Afghan democracy can be observed in the attitudes of Afghans. The Asia Foundation has been conducting public opinion surveys of the Afghan people over the past four years, and their latest results show declining confidence in the efficacy of elections (down from 75 per cent in 2006 to 52 per cent in 2008). The survey also found declining tolerance for alternative political views, with two-thirds of people opposed to the idea that all parties should be able to hold local meetings, presumably preferring that only parties with local support should be allowed to have meetings. While 40 per cent say they feel free to express their political views, almost the same number (39 per cent) believe they do not have that freedom due to fears for their own safety, security concerns or a Taliban presence. These results underscore the difficulty of establishing democracy in the current environment of conflict and violence that is evident across the country.

Ethnicity remains the most significant factor in Afghan politics, and the strongest determinant of how people will vote. At around 40 per cent of the population, the Pashtun are the largest ethnic group, though they do not constitute a majority. The Tajiks constitute about 30 per cent of the population, and the Hazara and Uzbeks about 10 per cent each. Several other ethnic groups, including the Aimak, Turkmen and Baluchi, make up the remainder.

The importance of ethnicity was borne out in the 2004 presidential elections, with Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, securing the vast majority of his ethnic group’s support, and picking up votes from other ethnic groups largely because of his high profile as the transitional president prior to the election. Incumbency played a significant role.

With the next presidential election due to be held on 20 August this year, the successful candidate will need to secure a good proportion of the Pashtun vote to win. Pashtun candidates with a high profile, including Karzai, Anwar Ahadi (the finance minister) and Gul Agha Sherzai (a former jihad leader who worked with the US invasion team in 2001 but is now willing to negotiate with the Taliban), are well-placed to do this.

There are at least two possible Tajik candidates who could cross the ethnic divide to win the election. Abdullah Abdullah, a senior Tajik leader from the north-east province of Panshir, has a Pashtun father, and has been actively promoting this fact to gain Pashtun support. Yunus Qanuni, another Tajik leader, came second in the 2004 election (with 16 per cent), but was subsequently elected to parliament. His election as Speaker has increased his profile among non-Tajik groups. The final list of presidential candidates is due to be announced in May.

Unfortunately, Afghanistan has been burdened by an electoral system for its national assembly (the Wolesi Jirga) which is inappropriate for most democracies, let alone a fledgling democracy struggling to heal the divisions of the recent past. The country uses the Single Non-Transferable Vote, or SNTV, system – best described as first-past-the-post for multi-member electorates – for provincial and national elections. Voters make one selection only. If the election is for five members, the five highest-polling candidates are elected.

Along with Jordan, Taiwan, Vanuatu and Pitcairn Island, Afghanistan is one of the few places in the world that uses SNTV. Electorates are formed by the boundaries of the thirty-four provinces, with seats distributed in proportion to the total population. This means that seat magnitude ranges from three seats in the smaller provinces to thirty-three seats in the most populated province, Kabul. A third of provinces elect ten or more members.

The absurdity of the system is highlighted by the results for Kabul province in the 2005 election. With 390 candidates competing for thirty-three seats, the ballot paper took up seven A3-sized sheets. As a result, there was a high rate of informal voting and many intending voters are reported to have discarded their ballot papers because of the difficulty in finding their preferred candidate.

When the transitional administration was deciding on an electoral system in 2004, prior to the country’s first elections, it seemed likely that a form of proportional representation would be adopted, with advisors warning against first-past-the-post or SNTV systems. According to electoral expert Andrew Reynolds, one of Karzai’s advisors was unable to give Cabinet a clear explanation of the proposed proportional representation system. This allowed opponents to argue that if the system could not be understood by Cabinet ministers it was unsuitable for the general population. According to Reynolds, SNTV was chosen as the “least bad” option.

One argument in support of SNTV was that it is simple. Voters need to make just one choice, so there’s no need for them to understand party lists or to number multiple boxes. This was an important consideration in a country with low literacy levels. But the large number of MPs representing many provinces, and therefore the large fields of candidates, negate this intended simplicity. Among other SNTV democracies, the largest electorate is only seven members.

The voting system also means that many candidates are elected with very low voter support. The leading candidate in Kabul received only 13.8 per cent of the vote, and twenty-three of the thirty-three elected members received less than one per cent. SNTV also weakens the party system by placing the emphasis on individual candidates. Without any party lists or recognition of parties on the ballot paper, there is no incentive for candidates to affiliate with parties. In fact, there remains a strong suspicion and distrust of political parties, as many of the older parties were military organisations during the civil war or were connected to the previous communist governments. In addition, President Karzai has been vocally opposed to political parties, blaming them for many of the ethnic divisions within the country.

Despite this distrust, registering political parties is a growth industry in Afghanistan. More than 100 parties are registered with the Ministry of Justice (ideally, an independent authority should be in charge of registering parties) and about twenty to twenty-five parties claim to have MPs in the Wolesi Jirga. Some of these MPs declared their party affiliation prior to the 2005 election, but many have been recruited into a party, or have switched allegiances, since the election. While parties tend to overstate how many representatives they have, MPs themselves often distance themselves from any party connection, seeing an advantage in being viewed as independent. As a result, the Wolesi Jirga operates as an assembly of 249 individuals with shifting alliances. (To be precise, 239 individuals, because ten members have been killed since the last election – another indication of the ongoing threats to democracy in the country.)

Most of the major parties have strong ethnic bases and advocate on behalf of their ethnic base in order to muster continued support. Many were former jihad parties that fought the Soviet occupation and then turned on each other during the civil war. While they may have demobilised their military operations, they have maintained military-like organisational structures, which have been useful in recruiting armies of volunteers and getting out the vote.

Since 2001, a new generation of multi-ethnic, democracy-based parties has emerged. Because their support base is hard to identify and their leaders tend to have a low-profile, these parties have had difficulty in gaining traction. Their organisational structures and financial resources mean that they find it difficult to match the older parties in campaigning.

In an effort to reduce the number of parties, it has been proposed that the current minimum membership requirement of 700 members to register a party be increased to 10,000 members. While this change might simplify Afghanistan’s party system, it will not necessarily improve it. There would remain no incentive for parties to be promoted at election time, and the emphasis on leaders and individual candidates – during elections and within parliament – would continue.

It has also been suggested that parties should be required to have a national presence, with a certain number of members in a majority of provinces. This, it’s argued, would reduce the current emphasis on geographically based parties with distinct ethnic platforms and encourage a shift to multi-ethnic parties with the national interest at heart. Ethnic tensions would be diffused rather than accentuated during election campaigns, and parties would be forced to differentiate themselves via their policy platforms.

WHILE MUCH of this may (and should) sound like a pessimistic view of Afghan democracy, there are positives to note. Western influence during the transition to democracy has resulted in a requirement that a quarter of the Wolesi Jirga seats (sixty-eight of 249) be reserved for women, a significant breakthrough for an Islamic country. Although some women MPs appear to be mouthpieces for their male political guardians, there are several strong, independent women in the Wolesi Jirga providing a growing voice for women’s rights in the country.

But Afghanistan’s democratic institutions will need to change significantly if the country is to survive as a functioning democracy. A form of proportional representation, or a mix of proportional and individual seats, should be introduced so that there is a greater connection between voters’ choices and election outcomes. Proportional representation would also provide greater legitimacy to election results, in contrast to lottery-style SNTV which allows candidates to be elected with 0.4 per cent of the vote. If SNTV is to be retained, the size of electorates should be reduced to avoid the large numbers currently elected from some provinces. Kabul province, for example, could be divided into seven electorates of five members each.

A move to proportional representation would also strengthen the party system by requiring groupings of party candidates. The party system should be further strengthened by adopting rules of parliamentary conduct that recognise parties. Although this may be culturally difficult in Afghanistan, which has a history of consensus decision-making, it would smooth the way for the management of business and debate in the Wolesi Jirga chamber. Other changes to party law, such as introducing public funding and giving an independent registrar the power to audit party finances, would help to level the playing field between parties.

The problem with all of these proposals is that with the current electoral and party systems in place, the winners and losers know who they are. For meaningful reform to occur, the current winners will have to act unselfishly by giving up some of their power for the good of the country. It is difficult to be confident of such an outcome.

Today, the Darul Aman Palace’s prospects mirror that of democracy in Afghanistan. There’s great potential, but the unstable structure needs urgent renovation to avoid complete collapse. •

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On one level, Hindman is right to view with scepticism the more overblown claims about the internet’s impact on politics. The wave of information utopianism, whose 1990s bible was Wired, began to recede with the dot com crash. There’s no doubt, too, that the interlinked academic literatures around the public sphere and public deliberation can be quite problematic. Jürgen Habermas’s work – which originally had a lot more to do with his post-Marxism and his epistemological commitments as a philosopher than with media theory – has become something of a cliché. The advocates of deliberative democracy are far too often trying to put some flesh on the bones of the “thin” liberalism of Rawlesian political theory rather than addressing the deep structural causes of the democratic deficit in Western societies. Ironically, both perspectives arguably share the suspicion of politics that they bemoan when they mourn the hollowing out of democratic practices and ethics.

So there’s no doubt that utopian flights of fancy and abstract normative theory both need a reality check with careful empirical work. That appears to be Hindman’s project, but the problem is that both its conceptual framing and its analysis of data don’t live up to the inflated billing implied by the desire to shatter a “myth.” For too much of the time, Hindman is tilting his analytical lance at arguments of straw.

The problems begin with the analytical frame Hindman adopts. He quickly narrows down the range of possible targets for his myth-busting to the claim that the internet will bring about “democratisation.” But it’s unclear who’s actually making this claim, and Hindman simply ignores most of the more nuanced and specialised scholarship on the topic. If what he has to say when he gets down and dirty with the blogs later on is any indication, the real target is a bunch of journos and op-edders writing in the New York Times circa 2004. On top of that, “democratisation” soon becomes a proxy for the American political science concept of “voice.” Although it’s clear that his own sources wouldn’t support an equation, or an elision, of voice with equality, that’s basically the test he proposes for online politics. Lurking around here in the conceptual cobwebs, no doubt, is the attachment of North American political science to pluralism as a normative criterion.

Things don’t get much better when it comes to the data Hindman scrutinises. First, much of it is simply out of date in a fast moving landscape: surveys from 2002 and 2004 aren’t all that helpful for gauging the influence of online politics in 2008. Secondly, and I’m grateful to my QUT Creative Industries Faculty colleague Axel Bruns for this point, Hindman’s data is static rather than dynamic. When he scrutinises the status of leading bloggers in 2004 Hindman is taking a snapshot of a space that people move in and out of. Some of those bloggers are no longer active, and some aren’t “A-league” any more.

In any case, no one has seriously argued that blogging will mean that every citizen will find her thoughts read and discussed by every other citizen. We’re back with the odd frame of “equality” as a proxy for “voice.” Michel Bauwens’ concept of equipotentiality might tell us much more about what’s at stake in entry and exit, heterarchies and the division of labour within online political communities.

In some instances, Hindman’s data flatly contradicts his hypothesis – in his case study of the Howard Dean campaign, for instance. It’s somewhat trite to say that the online activism of the “netroots” was shaped by Dean and his strategists and to imply that this was even more the case in the Obama campaign. Of course it was, but again this ignores the iteration between campaign and online conversation and activism. Once more there’s a rigid contrast drawn between “bottom up” and “top down.”

Hindman appears to think that he’s demolished “the myth of digital democracy” because he’s found hierarchies within the online world and demonstrated that most citizens aren’t spending half the day browsing CNN or typing blog comments. But this myth appears to be one of Hindman’s own making. Unfortunately he’s missed the chance to engage with the specificity of online political engagement and trace the social relationships which are formed and altered through web-based interactivity.

As I’ve been suggesting throughout this review, Hindman’s book suffers from a fairly narrow and orthodox approach to political scholarship characteristic of the US political science mainstream. Another glaring omission is any comparative dimension – it’s as if the internet and politics are both solely American phenomena. It’s often remarked that there’s a lag in the dissemination of social media and interactive online practices in Australia. That may be so, but the lack of any reflexivity in examining the peculiarities of American culture to enable a rigorous comparison suggests that there might be an actual “myth of digital democracy” here. It would be fascinating if Hindman’s work, however flawed, were to inspire Australian scholars to do better. Certainly many of the same push factors – a disengaged citizenry and a sclerotic media – are present in this country. We need to start asking whether some of the lessons from American experience might be applied more innovatively here at a point in time when the Australian online political sphere is still – in some ways – in the early processes of its development.

Hindman is right, in a sense, to gesture to the big challenge – and this holds true for Australia as well – that of the dispersion and dissemination of political discussion and activism further throughout the population. But his own deracinated concept of “democratisation” points to the degree to which he’s pointing his analytical armoury at the wrong target. It might better have been aimed at the political system itself. A richer and more fine grained analysis, enlivened by a more robust and original conceptual architecture, could have offered some pointers here, rather than countering a mythical myth with a very narrow and methodologically flawed exercise in garden variety American political science. •

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TO PARAPHRASE former prime minister Paul Keating, you should never stand between a political party and a bucket of money. The major parties have become addicted to unlimited private funding and extremely generous public funding, with exponential increases in campaigning costs over recent years. But the increases have not been matched by prudent regulation. In fact, accountability and transparency were the big losers under the Howard government.

For these reasons, the Rudd government’s green paper on political finance, released last week, is a critically important step in determining the future direction of political funding and expenditure in Australia. Although the paper does not reveal anything new – apart from some updated campaign figures – it does draw together the main issues and arguments for a new regulatory regime. It will form the basis for future debate in this critical area.

The green paper identifies various regulatory options. These include introducing a cap on campaign expenditure, a cap on the size of donations or a combined cap on both expenditure and donations – or, less likely, a ban on all donations, with increased public funding filling the void.

Originally promised for July, the green paper has taken a disappointingly long time to appear, especially given its uncontroversial nature. It’s hard to know exactly why it has been buried in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy all these months.

According to the Special Minister of State, Senator John Faulkner, the delay is a result of the need for consultation with the states, but the arguments for and against various regimes are well-known, with political finance being the subject of numerous parliamentary committee inquiries in recent years. This year alone there have been at least five inquiries at federal and state levels. That it took so long to release a non-binding discussion paper does not augur well for the federal, state and territory government accord needed for a new regulatory system.

Despite the delay, the signs indicate a genuine desire and commitment on the part of the Rudd government, and particularly Senator Faulkner, to make political finance regulation more accountable. The government has already introduced legislation to do three important things: ban foreign donations; reduce the donation disclosure threshold from $10,900 to $1000; and close the loophole created by the fact that donations made to different divisions of a party are treated separately (which means that a person can donate a total of $98,100 to Labor or the Coalition parties and escape disclosure). The Coalition has been unwilling to support these measures.

More than a year after it came to government, Labor has still given no indication of which regulatory model it prefers. Does the government have a genuinely open mind about which approach to take, or is progress too difficult to achieve within the Labor Party? The latter, I suspect.

One indication of the internal fights going on inside Labor is the party’s commendable commitment to voluntarily disclosing all donations at fundraising events above $1000. Senator Faulkner says it would be hypocritical not to proceed this change, given that the legislation has already been introduced. But why aren’t all donations above $1000 disclosed, not just those from fundraising events? Perhaps that would be pushing the party’s bagmen too far. And besides, why should Labor give its opponents the distinct fundraising advantage of non-disclosure when the Coalition has been unwilling to give parliamentary support for the more transparent measures.

Despite the delays and non-committal approach of the Rudd government on political finance regulation, it is already way ahead of the Howard government in three significant areas. First, there is a genuine commitment to tackle these issues in a comprehensive manner, by addressing revenue and expenditure issues as a package.

Second, the current government is clearly moving in the direction of greater accountability and transparency. The Howard government increased the threshold for donation disclosure from $1500 to more than $10,000, allowing many more donors to make their donations without public scrutiny. This approach suited the Coalition’s aim of developing a secret funding base, but ran counter to fairness principles that call for voters being informed of how a party is financially supported. The Rudd government has already sought to reduce the threshold to $1000, but has been thwarted by opposition numbers in the Senate.

Finally, the Rudd government is committed to consultation with state governments and electoral commissions – and now, finally, with the Australian public. The Coalition, on the other hand, pushed its electoral finance changes through the parliament without any consultation at all, using its numbers in the Senate to stifle debate.

There are two months – until 23 February – for people to make submissions on the green paper. Submissions will be publicly available after that date, and it’s to be hoped that by then Labor’s position, and that of other political parties, will be clearer.

The government is also planning to release a second green paper on electoral reform, on broader electoral issues, in 2009, and is inviting submissions (also by 23 February) on what should be included in that paper. •

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