How Democracy Ends

"No. Actually, despite its subject matter, Runciman is not wholly pessimistic about the future. Although I must admit, I did end the book feeling fairly pessimistic about the future! He takes as his subject the question that has become incredibly politically timely: with the rise of populist and antidemocratic leaders throughout the world, are we entering the last days of liberal democracy? Trump is of course the most famous, but by no means the only or the first. The thing that Runciman does really skilfully is he takes Trump’s inauguration as his starting point, but it doesn’t feel like a ripped-from-the-headlines response to Trump. He uses the inauguration as a way into democratic failures in Greece in the 1970s, democratic failures throughout history, democratic failures in the global south. And then, essentially, he asks: What does democratic failure look like in the 21st-century? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We think we have a clear idea about what the end of a democracy looks like: it’s where generals supplant politicians. That’s a very clear sense of whether or not democracy has ended. But if you have a situation in which there are still elections, but only party members can vote, has democracy ended? If you have elections, but one party controls the media and is able to bribe loads and loads of voters, has democracy ended? What does democratic failure look like in the modern day? He does all of this and sets out this incredibly interesting global set of questions in what I think is a wonderful and warm prose style as well. It was a really fantastic read, even though it did at times make me feel like I am, in fact, covering the end days of democracy. Yeah. His essential point is: if you think about democracy as we know it in its modern form, it’s effectively at the age where you would expect it to be going through a mid-life crisis. Now, some people recover from their mid-life crises and go on to live happy, fulfilling lives for the second half of their lifespan. Other people buy fancy sports cars and crash them off a cliff. He sets out those possible futures very well. It’s not as doom laden as one would expect, while still being pretty doom laden. Not least because it doesn’t wholly feel like we are going to have the political leadership capable of making the correct decisions to avoid being one of the people whose mid-life crisis leads them to crash into a cliff."