Summary: What happens when people lose faith in their political regime? Yesterday’s post gave us the Terrifying news about the state of the Republic: each generations of Americans has less faith in democracy than their parents. Today Foa and Mounk explain what happens next. We are locking ourselves into guaranteed failure: we don’t work our political machinery, which fails to function, so we lose confidence in it. Will this be the pitiful end of the great experiment of the Founders?
Colonel Stok (Soviet secret police): “These Germans, sometimes I wonder how we managed to beat them.
Vaclav (Czechoslovakian secret police): “The Nazis?”
Stok: “Oh, we still haven’t beaten them. The Germans, I mean.”
— From Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin(1964).
Losing faith in the American project.
“The Signs of Deconsolidation”
By Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk.
Journal of Democracy, January 2017.
Americans have long been growing dissatisfied with the state of their political system. As survey researchers have chronicled over recent decades, an overwhelming majority of citizens now believes that the United States is “headed in the wrong direction” {also see Gallup Polls} and Trust in such major institutions as Congress and the presidency has fallen markedly {see the GSS and Gallup Polls}. Engagement in formal political institutions has ebbed. The media are more mistrusted than ever (see data on all institutions here). Even so, most scholars have given these findings a stubbornly optimistic spin: U.S. citizens, they claim, have simply come to have higher expectations of their government.
As we showed in an essay in the July 2016 Journal of Democracy, that interpretation is untenable. American citizens are not just dissatisfied with the performance of particular governments; they are increasingly critical of liberal democracy itself. …
Americans’ dissatisfaction with the democratic system is part of a much larger global pattern. It is not just that the proportion of Americans who state that it is “essential” to live in a democracy, which stands at 72% among those born before World War II, has fallen to 30% among millennials. It is also that, contrary to Ronald Inglehart’s response to our earlier essay in these pages, a similar cohort pattern is found across all longstanding democracies, including Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand. In virtually all cases, the generation gap is striking, with the proportion of younger citizens who believe it is essential to live in a democracy falling to a minority.
Unless we have faith in the American political regime, it cannot work.
What is more, this disaffection with the democratic form of government is accompanied by a wider skepticism toward liberal institutions. Citizens are growing more disaffected with established political parties, representative institutions, and minority rights. Tellingly, they are also increasingly open to authoritarian interpretations of democracy. The share of citizens who approve of “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections,” for example, has gone up markedly in most of the countries where the World Values Survey asked the question — including such varied places as Germany, the United States, Spain, Turkey, and Russia.
The stark picture painted by the World Values Survey is echoed in the findings of a large number of national polls conducted in recent months. …in the United States, 46% of respondents in an October 2016 survey reported that they either “never had” or had “lost” faith in U.S. democracy. …
These changes in opinion are worrying in and of themselves. What is all the more striking is that they are increasingly reflected in actual political behavior. In recent years, parties and candidates that blame
an allegedly corrupt political establishment for most problems, seek to concentrate power in the executive, and challenge key norms of democratic politics have achieved unprecedented successes in a large number of liberal democracies across the globe …
An Early-Warning System.
Political scientists have long assumed that what they call “democratic consolidation” is a one-way street: Once democracy in a particular country has been consolidated, the political system is safe, and liberal
democracy is here to stay. Historically, this has indeed been the case. So far, democracy has not collapsed in any wealthy country that has experienced at least two government turnovers as a result of free and fair elections. But a large part of the reason that liberal democracy proved to be so stable in the past was its ability to persuade voters of its advantages. Indeed, while political scientists have offered many divergent definitions of democratic consolidation, they mostly agree on this key insight. …
Consolidated democracies are stable, Linz and Stepan argue, because their citizens have come to believe
that democratic forms of government possess unique legitimacy and that authoritarian alternatives are unacceptable. This raises a question that might have seemed to be of merely theoretical interest until a few years ago: What happens to the stability of wealthy liberal democracies when many of their citizens no longer believe that their system of government is especially legitimate or even go so far as to express open support for authoritarian regime forms?
To answer this question, we need to conceive of the possibility that democratic consolidation might not be a one-way street after all. Democracy comes to be the only game in town when an overwhelming majority of a country’s citizens embraces democratic values reject authoritarian alternatives, and support candidates or parties that are committed to upholding the core norms and institutions of liberal democracy.
By the same token, it can cease to be the only game in town when, at some later point, a sizable minority of citizens loses its belief in democratic values, becomes attracted to authoritarian alternatives, and starts voting for “antisystem” parties, candidates, or movements that flout or oppose
constitutive elements of liberal democracy. Democracy may then be said to be deconsolidating. …
The Consequences of Deconsolidation.
…The process of deconsolidation now taking place across most liberal democracies is a very serious warning sign. But neither fate nor destiny decrees that democracy will falter. For now, the window for political agency remains open. Whether democratic deconsolidation will one day be seen as the beginning of the end for liberal democracy depends in good part on the ability of democracy’s defenders to heed the warning and to mount a coherent response.
————————- Read the full essay. ————————-
Abstract for this paper
“In recent years, parties and candidates challenging key democratic norms have won unprecedented popular support in liberal democracies across the globe. Drawing on public opinion data from the World Values Survey and various national polls, we show that the success of anti-establishment parties and candidates is not a temporal or geographic aberration, but rather a reflection of growing popular disaffection with liberal-democratic norms and institutions, and of increasing support for authoritarian interpretations of democracy.
“The record number of anti-system politicians in office raises uncertainty about the strength of supposedly ‘consolidated’ liberal democracies and highlights the need for further analysis of the signs of democratic deconsolidation.”
Update: More about this paper
This is a follow-up to “The Danger of Deconsolidation“ in the Journal of Democracy, July 2016.
Three experts submitted critiques. They are here along with a reply by Foa and Mounk.
About the authors
Roberto Stefan Foa.
After completing his PhD in Government at Harvard University, Foz worked at the Financial Times, then the World Bank as designer of the Indices of Social Development. Now he is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Melbourne and a Principal Investigator of the World Values Surveys.
His research seeks to understand how institutions vary across the world, and why these patterns of variation prove so persistent and resistant to change over time. See his website.
Yascha Mounk.
Yascha Mounk is a Lecturer on Political Theory at Harvard, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund, and a Nonresident Fellow at New America’s Political Reform Program. His essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He has appeared on radio and television in over ten countries.
See his website. His second book came out in May: The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State
For More Information
We can fix America. See the suggestions in Reforming America: steps to a new politics.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about politics in America, about the Trump years in America, and especially these…
- Can we organize the political reform of America? Our past shows how.
- The First Step to reforming America — Organizing.
- The 1% are changing America. It’s our move.
- Resolve to begin the reform of America in 2017!
- A picture of America, showing a path to political reform.
See Mounk’s new book.
From the publisher…
“A novel focus on ‘personal responsibility’ has transformed political thought and public policy in America and Europe. Since the 1970s, responsibility ― which once meant the moral duty to help and support others―has come to suggest an obligation to be self-sufficient. This narrow conception of responsibility has guided recent reforms of the welfare state, making key entitlements conditional on good behavior.
“Drawing on intellectual history, political theory, and moral philosophy, Yascha Mounk shows why the The Age of Responsibility
“Personal responsibility began as a conservative catchphrase. But over time, leaders across the political spectrum came to subscribe to its underlying framework. Today, even egalitarian philosophers rarely question the normative importance of responsibility. Emphasizing the pervasive influence of luck over our lives, they cast the poor as victims who cannot be held responsible for their actions.
“Mounk shows that today’s focus on individual culpability is both wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe our fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to other key values, such as the desire to live in a society of equals. Recognizing that even society’s neediest members seek to exercise genuine agency, Mounk builds a positive conception of responsibility. Instead of punishing individuals for their past choices, he argues, public policy should aim to empower them to take responsibility for themselves―and those around them.”