In the wake of Labour's recent election victory, Kamala Harris's emergence as Democratic Presidential candidate, and the on-going white supremacist violence in Britain, now is a good time to reflect on the health of democracy. A lot has been said since the so called democracy debate of the early 1990s. After a brief period in which representative democracy seemed all-conquering, concerns about the future of democracy re-emerged in the mid-2000s, only to be supercharged by the growth of populism a decade later. Against this background, and following Donald Trump's success in 2016, a slew of books, academic papers and newspaper articles questioned the longevity of representative government, some going so far as to suggest that democracy had had its day.
While a lot of the commentary published in the last few years has focused on contemporary social and political trends, Pierre Rosanvallon's Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust takes the long view, examining the dynamics of representative politics since 1649. Rosanvallon argues that, throughout its history, democracy has been dogged by “representative entropy.” In essence, he claims that elections are moments which reset the relationship between citizens and their governments: they are moments when the aspirations of voters and the promises of professional politicians are brought into alignment. However, once the election is over, the concerns of citizens and the priorities of their representatives begin to diverge, and over the course of a parliament or a Presidential term this divergence becomes increasingly pronounced. In that sense, he argues that democracy is the constant story of hope followed by disappointment.
Writing in the decade before Brexit, and the decade before Donald Trump’s successful Presidential run, Rosanvallon was one of the first political theorists to spot the rebirth of populism. For Rosanvallon, the re-emergence of populism was the result of three trends which had their roots in cultural shifts that began in the 1960s: a general loss of faith in science; a loss of faith in economic prediction and planning; and a loss of faith in community. This threefold loss of faith, he argued, amounted to a growing pessimism about the possibilities of politics.
Robin in Trump Towers
Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson points to more recent, but equally worrying trends. Anderson argues that since the 1980s, political discussion in Britain and America has been dominated by “zero sum economics” – the assumption that, in terms of the economy, if I win you must necessarily lose. She argues that the rejection of win-win economics has undermined popular support for social programs and collectivist political action. Lorenzo DiTommaso's work, which focuses on the apocalypse, popular culture and computer games, also helps understand contemporary political problems. DiTommaso argues that since 2000 there has been a general loss of faith in the human capacity to solve global problems, a conviction that the climate emergency and the growing biodiversity crisis are simply too big and too complex for humanity to deal with.
In this context, it makes perfect sense for Harris's campaign and Keir Starmer's new government to promote a renewed faith in the possibilities of democratic government. In fact, on both sides of the Atlantic, progressive administrations are hoping that government action to promote "meaningful economic growth", economic growth that provides tangible benefits for communities across each nation, will counter populism. For the first time since the 1970s, then, progressive administrations in Britain and America have acknowledged that government action is essential in solving contemporary social and political problems. This is a significant change from the political consensus described by Rosanvallon, and perhaps the best antidote to the politics of distrust. "Representative entropy" notwithstanding, let’s hope this hope continues.