From How democracy ends (David Runciman, 2018) pp78-80
It is true, as Piketty notes, that the democratic reforms that preceded the First World War made some inroads against the advance of inequality. Yet we do not know how far that process would have gone, or if it would ever have gone far enough, because war intervened before the experiment could be completed. Similarly, we do not know whether the New Deal would have been enough to rescue American democracy without war, because war came and made the question redundant. We do not have a historical answer to the question of how to tackle inequality that does not involve large-scale violence. There is no evidence that democracy alone can do it.
The ancient historian Walter Scheidel goes further. In his 2017 book The Great Leveler he argues that no society in human history has managed to redress rising inequality without the intervention of large-scale violence.? It does not have to take the form of war. Violent revolution, natural disaster, epidemic and plague are all sufficient. They do not need to do their work by breeding forms of social solidarity, as wars of national survival can do. It is enough that the collective experience of violence is sufficiently widespread to ensure that all suffer relatively equally. A calamity that wipes out the property and lives of the rich as effectively as those of the poor will make for a more equal society. It will also be hell on earth.
What does this mean for the future prospects of democracy? The most successful democracies are the ones that have managed to limit violence, ensure against disaster and protect the peaceful lives of their citizens. As a result, inequality has slipped free from the democratic grip in which it was once held. When the political order created in the aftermath of the Second World War broke down at the end of the 1970s, inequality started to rise again. The period since then has seen the continued decline of violence and the continued rise of inequality. The two go together. Both processes accelerated after the end of the Cold War. Then, following the financial crash of 2008, the conditions for a populist backlash against inequality were in place. It became possible to see just how unequal our societies had become, especially once it was clear that the rich would not be punished for the crisis. But these are not the same as the conditions for tackling inequality, which requires more than just a populist revolt. There have been some piecemeal reforms, as there were in 1914. The Obama administration made small inroads into rising inequality. We do not know how far that process would have gone because the Trump presidency intervened.
In democracy we now have a political system that can suppress the causes of violence without being able to address the problems that outbreaks of violence served to resolve in the past. Minor progress is possible. Big progress is elusive, and always liable to be derailed by the backlash small progress provokes. We may be stuck.
This problem of violence and inequality is a large-scale version of the problem of democracy and coups. The violent overthrow of a democracy establishes the conditions under which democracy can be defended: it clarifies the situation. Without that prospect, democracy simply persists and the frustrations that people increasingly feel with it get channelled into forms of mutual mistrust. Ours are not the first democracies in history to get stuck in a rut of conspiracy theories and fake news. But ours are the first with no obvious way out. Reform is possible but it may not be sufficient. Violence is impossible but it may be all that works. Democracies have become very good at solving one problem – violence – that has in the past been a precondition for solving the other – inequality. We do not know what happens next. One possibility is that things carry on as they are. Democracy does not collapse into violence. It simply continues its drift into cranky obsolescence.
Many democracies around the world today still have room to grow and mature. India’s democracy is relatively young and it is possible to imagine the scope for reforms that would make it real for hundreds of millions of citizens who have yet fully to feel its benefits. In some parts of the world, including Africa, democracy has barely got going at all. There, political reform can still tap into enormous, unfulfilled potential. The twenty-first century may see a whole series of successful experiments in how far democracy can go towards tackling endemic mistrust and division without falling back into violence.
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