From The Retreat of Western Liberalism (Edward Luce, 2017) p118-21
Whatever else you can say about the EU, it is not a democracy. ‘European integration, it needs to be emphasized, was part and parcel of this comprehensive attempt to constrain the popular will,’ says Princeton’s Jan-Werner Muller. ‘It added supranational constraints to national ones.’ The system of anonymous committees that set the rules for its member states from the minutes: product regulations to the limits of tax and spending is virtually impervious to democratic control. They call it comitology. Only a tiny few understand Brussels’s comitological system. The president of the European Commission is almost always a nonentity drawn from somewhere like Belgium or Luxembourg: easy for governments to control, never a household name. He presides over a Byzantium of layered bureaucracy that would have been familiar to Franz Kafka. It is ironic that Europe’s powers have metastasised so far since the Soviet threat receded. ‘Why, just as democracy seemed to triumph, did there emerge a concern to limit its scope?’ asked Peter Mair, author of Ruling the Void.
A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I took a traineeship in Brussels at the European Commission – a stagiare, as it is called. Although I was a supporter of the European project, those six months inoculated me for life against working in a bureaucracy. It was a stifling experience. Journalism promised wind in my hair on an open road. A university friend urged me to look up his brother, a British journalist who had made his reputation lampooning the ways of Brussels. His name was Boris Johnson. His trade was slanted reporting. It was ‘better to be pissing in from the outside than pissing out from the inside’, Boris joked, paraphrasing Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous quip. Though I disagreed with Boris’s politics and his journalistic methods – he specialised in mischievous caricature – it was easy to see why he had gained such a following in the UK. A quarter of a century later, Boris played a starring role in Britain’s vote to exit from Europe. The mandarins of Brussels, like Hillaryland, are blind to how people perceive them. Brexit has only reinforced their worldview. The verdict in Brussels is that Britain’s exit is an opportunity. It will allow European integration to pick up more speed. It is an open question whether Brussels’s response will trigger more Brexits in the years ahead. The same obliviousness applies to Washington, where l have lived for the past decade. Ninety-one per cent of Washington voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump’s victory has only bolstered the view that people outside the capital’s beltway are ignorant and malevolent.
The term illiberal democracy was devised by Fareed Zakaria more than a decade ago. The public’s idea of democracy is that it is a simple process in which people elect their representatives to carry out their instructions. Scholars call this the ‘folk theory of democracy’. It is an updated view of the faith medieval peasants placed in their monarch. If the king was ignoring them it must be because he had bad advisers. Simply update the divine right of kings with the divine right of the people: ‘The people are never corrupted, but sometimes deceived.’ More and more people feel they are being tricked. Politicians promise one thing and do another. Resentment has grown steadily over the last two decades, in the US and elsewhere. The public’s trust in political institutions has fallen to an all-time low. The sophisticated view of democracy is that it can only work if it is checked by a system of individual rights, independence of the judiciary, the separation of powers and other balances. There is no such thing as the popular will, just a series of messy deals between competing interests. It is hard to watch any legislature making laws without thinking the whole business is corrupt. As Bismarck put it, ‘Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.’ I have watched my fair share of sausage-making in the European Commission and on Capitol Hill. It’s enough to put you off eating pork for good. Yet it is the only alternative to rule by dictatorial flat.
The story of liberal democracy is thus a continual tension between the neat democratic folk theory and the more complex liberal idea. Nowadays they have turned into opposing forces. Here, then, is the crux of the West’s crisis: our societies are split between the will of the people and the rule of the experts the tyranny of the majority versus the club of self-serving insiders; Britain versus Brussels; West Virginia versus Washington. It follows that the election of Trump, and Britain’s exit from Europe, is a reassertion of the popular will; In the words of one Dutch scholar, Western populism is an ‘illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism’.“ The British and American people supposedly reclaimed their sovereignty in 2016. I call it the Reaction. It is pretty clear which direction the Western elites ate bending. Davos is no fan club for more democracy. Having hived off many areas that were once under democratic control (such as monetary policy and trade and investment), post-2016 Western elites now fear they have not gone far enough.
But elite disenchantment with democracy has been rising for many years. According to the World Values Survey, which offers the most detailed take on the state of global public opinion, support for democracy has plummeted across the Western world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is particularly true of the younger generations. For a long time, academics assumed that rising signs of disaffection with democracy were simply a reflection of dislike of the government of the moment. Government legitimacy may have been on the wane, but regime legitimacy was still robust. There were no alternatives. Democracy, after all, was the only game in town. That reading was far too complacent. When asked on a scale of one to ten how essential it was for them to live in a democracy, almost three-quarters of Americans born before the Second World War give it a ten. Democracy is something of a sacred value to the generation who fought against fascism or suffered under it and lived through the Cold War. Near-similar levels of support apply to their European counterparts, and to baby-boomers. For millennials, the opposite holds. Fewer than one in three American and European millennials answer ten.
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