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It is doubtful that support for democracy outside the West still depends on what the West says and does. The West’s ‘soft’ power has waned…
by PROFESSOR STEVEN FRIEDMAN
IF what is left of democracy in the United States goes, will that threaten political freedom here and around the world? Probably not. It might even do the opposite.
Over the past few days, the chances that the US’s limited democracy will cease to exist have become much more real.
Pundits and reporters insist that the weekend’s attempt to assassinate Donald Trump has made his election inevitable. That judgement may be too hasty. But it is made more credible by reported Democratic Party plans to change its strategy in a way which would make Trump’s election inevitable.
According to a report, the Democrats will abandon attacks on Trump for fear of being seen to incite violence against him. They will instead target campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza to show that their candidate is tough on violence. Throughout the West, when liberals and centrists try to win by showing that they are better at being right-wing than the right, they lose. They ensure that only the right’s version of the world is up for discussion –. voters then support candidates who really believe in it.
Trump has signalled that, if he wins, he will use his power to attacks his opponents and so roll back democracy. The Supreme Court has ruled that he can break the law as long as he does this on ‘official business,’ so he has a blank cheque to do whatever he wants to his critics. He has talked approvingly of becoming President for life.
End of an illusion
If all this happens it would be seen in much of the world as the end of US democracy since few have noticed that it’s not a democracy now.
In democracies, you can only become head of government by winning most votes – there, the electoral college ensures that the candidate with most votes often loses. In democracies, all votes are equal. In the US, a vote in a large urban state can count much less than one in a small rural entity. In democracies, everyone is allowed to vote – there, some states deprive many people who might vote against their government of a vote. And democracies do not keep people in prison for a quarter of a century without trial as the US does on Guantanamo Bay.
Despite all this, admirers of the West continue to call the US a democracy – this week one of our daily papers declared that the attack on Trump was an assault on ‘US democracy’. If the USA was run by a President for life who locked up his opponents, they would have to admit that it was a democracy no more.
Some in the US and elsewhere believe this would be a blow to democracy everywhere. Anti-democrats would argue that, if the system has collapsed in the US which once claimed to export it to the world, it is doomed everywhere else too. The gains of hard right parties in Europe would presumably makes this even more likely because it would signal that the all of the West was giving up on democracy.
One reason for taking this view seriously is that, as the late Argentine political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell argued, elites in countries outside the West are often attracted to formal democracy not because they see it as a guarantee of freedom but because they want to imitate the West. So democratic enthusiasm might wane among politicians and media if much of the West were no longer democratic.
This seems to apply here too. In negotiations on ending apartheid, Western influence helped to achieve a democratic result – the US signalled to the apartheid government that a white veto on decisions was out of the question. Western countries also played a role in shaping the provinces’ powers. Many here still see the West as the centre of the universe even if they oppose it. This suggests that democracy’s appeal may wane among our elites if the US abandons it.
Managing without the West
Despite all this, it doesn’t seem likely that, if democracy ends in the US, it would be threatened outside the West.
It seems unlikely that Trump would formally abolish democracy – he has no need to. If he continues to pack the courts with loyalists, he can do what he wants without changing anything. Like just about all right-wingers these days, Trump claims every move which strengthens his power as a win for democracy – he would no doubt continue to do this in office. He would find it difficult to become President for life but there is plenty of room to be dictator while seeming to accept democratic rules.
Neither are the European extreme right likely to end formal democracy in their countries. Another political scientist, Adam Przeworski, has just published an article arguing that the European right reject liberalism, since they want to remove rights from people who look different to them, but not formal democracy.
This does not mean that the threat to freedom and rights is any less great. But, as long as the US and Europe keep the shell of democracy, they will insist that they are still democracies – and will be believed by elites outside the West who see it as the centre of the planet.
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It is doubtful that support for democracy outside the West still depends on what the West says and does. The West’s ‘soft’ power has waned – it still has economic and military power but is less able to convince others that it is a force for good. It may be feared but is less of a role model.
Elites outside the West also know that you don’t have to be democratic to be the West’s friend – as the Israeli and Saudi states can confirm. Important non-Western states have remained democratic despite knowing that they don’t need to do this to remain friends of the West There is certainly no sign in this country that what elites think about democracy depends on what Western countries do – we hear much less than we did three decades ago on how to imitate Australia, Canada or Germany.
Democracy’s decline in the West might even boost it elsewhere.
It is still common for democracy to be rejected as ‘Western’ even though it is not. It wasn’t even invented in the West – it began in India or Iraq, not Greece. The more the West retreats from democracy, the less sense will it make to insist that the idea that people should govern themselves is a colonial view.
And, while it is less common now to hear that we should model our political system on what some country in the West does, the idea that ‘real democracy’ exists only in the West and that the rest of us should be trying to make our own systems look like those in Europe or North America is deeply embedded. If the link between democracy and the West is cut, it will be easier to discuss what sort of democracy our country needs.
If the West does begin to desert democracy, this will be a setback for humanity because many people will lose their freedom. But it should not make the rest of the world any less democratic and may even build support for democracy.
- Steven Friedman is a public commentator and an academic, currently employed as a Research Professor at the University of Johannesburg.
This article was first published on the online Professor Friedman’s online column, Against the Tide.
