Tgk1946's Blog

So let’s go back to nuclear weapons. There is still a puzzle here. If existential risk spells the end of democracy, what happened after Hiroshima? During the four decades of the Cold War, when the world had to live with the daily threat of destruction, democracy appeared to thrive. This was the great period of democratic uplift: democracy spread, it stabilised and it prospered. It was an era that culminated in Fukuyama’s claim that we had arrived at the end of history, with liberal democracy left in possession of the field. Even if we no longer believe that, it is clear that modern democracy had its best years when the nuclear state was also in the ascendant. If nuclear weapons are fatal to democracy, how did democracy manage to live with them so successfully? Part of the answer is: wishful thinking. The kind of democracy that flourished during the Cold War did not operate at the level of existential choice. It was built on bread-and-butter issues: welfare, jobs, education. The nuclear state, by bearing the weight of the ultimate fate of the world, gave the democratic state room to breathe. Yet the separation was not total. The bomb still found its way into democratic arguments. The vibrant anti- nuclear movements of the early 1960s and the early 1980s showed its power to mobilise large numbers of concerned citizens. Disarmament was sometimes an issue at the polls, and so too was the communist threat. The voters were not oblivious to the risks being run. Democracy thrived under these conditions because existential questions could be brought down to the level of bread-and-butter politics. The issue at election time was not really the fate of the world. It never is. What counted was how people felt about the politicians who were taking decisions on their behalf, big and small. That is always the basic question of representative democracy: what do we think about these people deciding for us? It doesn’t matter so much what is at stake. It could be a question of nuclear apocalypse or it could be a question of the price of bread. In October 1962, between the publication of ‘Silent Spring’ and ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, the world came as close as it ever has to nuclear catastrophe. During the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis the two nuclear superpowers looked set to unleash the unimaginable. As the climax approached, with Russian and American ships apparently set on a collision course, the fate of human civilisation hung in the balance. At the last, Kennedy and Khrushchev found a path back from the edge of the abyss, through a mixture of skill and luck. Ten days after that, the American voting public was given the chance to pass a verdict on its epic good fortune in the mid-term elections for Congress. How did they reward the president? Kennedy’s Democrats lost seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The issue that was bothering the voters in the places where he was punished at the polling booth: grain prices. When people have grown frustrated with one set of politicians or another, they make use of whatever tools are to hand. Nuclear politics, like green politics, can be a vehicle for reminding politicians not to take us for granted. That does not mean that democracy is capable of getting a grip on existential threats. It simply means that existential threats are sometimes a good way of kicking politicians where it hurts. Today, when much of the political establishment is committed to taking climate change seriously, rejecting it is a way for people who have had enough to make themselves heard. It is always a mistake to assume that one side in a democratic contest cares about the fate of the planet and the other side doesn’t. Both sides care and neither side cares. Both care because no one wants the world to end. Neither cares because this is democracy: what people really care about is who gets to tell them what to do.