“Democracy is measured not by its leaders doing extraordinary things, but by its citizens doing things extraordinarily well.” – John Gardiner
By Dr Vusi Shongwe
THERE is a dark joke that the Polish dissident thinker Adam Michnik likes to tell—If in 1987 God had asked the Poles what their three most fervent wishes were, they would have replied: “First, we want to live in a country without political prisoners. Second, we want a country without censorship and foreign armies. And third, we would like the Soviet Union to fall apart.”
And the good Lord listened to Poland, and all three wishes came true. We got our freedom. But today God is asking the Poles: “What have you actually done with that freedom?”
In her article, Is Liberal Democracy Already History?, Elżbieta Matyniak points out that it was three decades ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imagination—not just a theory—seemed to take root, projecting the possibility of comprehensive systemic change without bloodshed.
Velvet or otherwise un-radical, this kind of revolution became a “site” of tangible hope in many places, where words had power, people were allowed to speak and were listened to, and where they realised their agency through means other than weapons. The term “negotiated revolution” is not an oxymoron, but it remains an extraordinary event, as dictatorships resist any spirit of dialogue or compromise.
Early in 1989, under tremendous societal pressure, including a wave of nationwide industrial strikes, the Communist regime in Poland agreed to a round table dialogue in Warsaw. Hannah Arendt would have termed this a “privileged moment”, when people unite and rational argument prevails over violence.
That sense of privileged moment, wonder, and incredulity seemed universally shared then, just as it was four years later after a similar roundtable in the Johannesburg suburb of Kempton Park that ended apartheid in South Africa in 1994.
Matyniak now poignantly observes, those emblematic moments that heralded new beginnings have lost their awe-inspiring aura and are now often disregarded or even snubbed.
What has gone wrong?
It is not particularly comforting that John Adams, one of the United States’ founding fathers and the country’s second president, articulated a dark vision in an 1814 polemical letter to Congressman John Taylor: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Let us pause briefly by recalling a classic tragedy. Perhaps you remember the first act of Hamlet, when the prince, trying to tell his friend Horatio that uncanny things are happening in the royal court of Denmark, whispers: “The time is out of joint…” The times seem indeed to be out of joint, but as a historian, I would like to flesh out that phrase with some assorted findings and insights.
Once upon a time, there was a very happy chicken. Every day, the farmer would come to feed it. Each day, the chicken grew a little plumper and a little more complacent. Other animals on the farm tried to warn the chicken, saying: "You are going to die. The farmer is only trying to fatten you up." The chicken did not listen. Throughout its life, the farmer had come to feed it, muttering a few friendly words of encouragement. Why should things suddenly be different?
But, inevitably, one day things did change. “The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life,” Bertrand Russell observes in his characteristically wry tone, “at last wrings its neck instead.” As long as the chicken was young and thin, the farmer wanted it fattened; once it was plump enough for the market, the time arrived for it to be slaughtered.
Russell aimed to caution us against making facile predictions. If we don't understand what made things happen in the past, we cannot assume they will continue to happen in the future. Just as the chicken failed to anticipate its world might one day crumble, we too may be unaware of forthcoming changes.
In his book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, Yascha Mounk asserts that if we wish to venture an educated guess about the future of democracy, we must ask the “chicken question”. Was the past stability of democracy built upon conditions that are no longer in place? The answer might well be yes, argues Mounk.
Citizens, or voters, around the world have never particularly liked politicians, yet they largely trusted that elected officials would uphold their end of the deal, ensuring their lives would improve as a result. Today, that trust and optimism have evaporated. Citizens are deeply anxious about the future and increasingly view politics as a zero-sum game.
Reflecting on predictions, I am reminded of a passage I once read. In 1830, the King of France sent a young engineer to England to study a sensational invention: a steam train that had just begun to ferry passengers from Manchester to Liverpool. Upon arrival, the engineer sat by the track, taking copious notes as the sturdy little engine flawlessly pulled the world’s first railway train between the two cities. After calculating what he observed, he reported back to Paris: “The thing is impossible,” he stated. “It cannot work.”
It is tempting to scoff at the engineer. However, the truth is that it was not the mathematical equations in his notes that led to his absurd conclusion but rather his all-too-human refusal to believe that his understanding of the world could be so mistaken.
There are long decades when history seems to slow to a crawl. Elections are won and lost, laws adopted and repealed, new stars emerge, and legends are interred. Yet for all the ordinary passage of time, the lodestars of culture, society, and politics remain unchanged.
Then there are those short years when everything changes all at once. Political newcomers storm the stage. Voters clamour for policies that may have seemed unthinkable until yesterday. Long-simmering social tensions erupt into explosive confrontations.
A government that had appeared immutable presents itself as increasingly fragile. This is the moment we find ourselves in now. For many years, democracy reigned supreme. Then the future arrived—and proved to be exceptionally different.
Donald Trump’s election to the White House has been widely deemed the most striking manifestation of democracy's crisis. For the first time in its history, the oldest and most powerful democracy elected a president who openly disdained basic constitutional norms—someone who left his supporters “in suspense” about whether he would accept the election's outcome, who called for his primary opponent's incarceration, and who consistently favoured authoritarian adversaries over democratic allies.
We live in an era of radical uncertainty. The range of possible outcomes is broader now than it seemed a few years ago. Prediction is more challenging than ever. Yet, Mounk argues, the one prediction that has reliably misled us—the belief that things will forever remain as they always have—is still the most popular, even today.
A fractured polity
Heraclitus’s statement resonates more than ever today. Both ruling and opposition parties preach a similar narrative. They seek a new type of society—one not necessarily democratic—with stronger leadership that excludes opposition from decision-making and selects groups to represent the “real nation”.
Their differences lie in the type of nation they envision, but both distrust liberal democracy and strive to consolidate power. Populism appeals directly to the people and has declared itself the representative of those who feel excluded.
Both conservative and leftist populists converge on this point, employing similar strategies to confront the traditional political system. Left-wing populists claim to defend the poor, as do right-wing populists. Consequently, dialogue—an essential aspect of democracy—has become increasingly elusive.
We are living through a time of uncertainty and political turbulence—both at home and abroad. At home, we take our democracy for granted, yet it is far more complex than simply having the right to vote. In many countries, widespread discontent prevails among the governed, and democracy is in retreat.
Irvern Bell once remarked: “Most of us can read the handwriting on the wall; we just assume it is addressed to somebody else.” Things are falling apart. The centre cannot hold. As George Orwell opined: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
The real tragedy of our time is that although we possess the know-how to solve many of our problems, we lack the will. We are anxious yet immobilised. We recognise our problems but seem incapable of mobilising our resources to act.
In her piece, Why Democracy Produces Incompetent Leaders – And How to Fix It, Claude Forthomme begins by stating that democracy doesn’t work. She believes democracy produces an abundance of incompetent and dishonest political leaders who exploit people’s credulity and prejudices, thriving on emotion-driven discourse and fake news.
Forthomme contends that most people do not trust democracy to deliver. Her argument is supported by a Pew survey from 2019, which revealed that in 27 countries, a majority (51%) expressed dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy. She points out that anti-establishment leaders, parties, and movements have emerged on both ends of the political spectrum.
Ironically, many in developing countries find authoritarian figures more trustworthy than democratically elected politicians, hence the success of the “Chinese model”. There are two enemies of democracy: voter apathy and ignorance, alongside incompetent political leaders.
In his book Renewal, John Gardner wrote that “active citizen participation is not only good democratic doctrine but also essential to renewal. Institutions are forever decaying; individuals regenerate society”. John F. Kennedy argued that the ignorance of a single voter in a democracy compromises the security of all.
Similarly, 1986 Nobel Prize winner and public choice economist James Buchanan pointed out that many voters are too preoccupied with daily life to navigate political machinations, rendering them “rationally ignorant”. Forthomme further argues that there are no requirements for running for office in a democracy; anyone can wake up in the morning and decide to run for election.
Democracy: Human fervour
Research on democracy provides a plethora of empirical evidence that liberal democracy is in deep trouble. Much of this trouble is rooted in our intelligence, creativity, enthusiasm, and passion—collectively termed human fervour.
Human fervour is two-sided. On the positive side, it drives human progress, well-being, prosperity, knowledge acquisition, and the pursuit of happiness. On the negative side, it can propel humans towards tyranny, despotism, dogmatism, hatred, ruthlessness, and cruelty.
Human fervour has the capacity to elicit the best as well as the worst in us. Our fervour encourages us to excel individually, to heal deadly diseases, alleviate poverty, and eradicate hunger in vast regions of the world. Nonetheless, it also enables oppression, destruction, and annihilation at an unprecedented scale.
Thus, we must govern ourselves in a way that mitigates the darker aspects of human passions; otherwise, we are doomed.
Jerzy Szacki provides a compelling point regarding human fervour. Disenchanted by how newly minted citizens handled themselves during the critical post-revolutionary period, he offers a sobering observation in his essay Dreams and Reality of Polish Democracy. “The achievements of our revolution are genuine and considerable and realistically,” he argues, “they could not be much greater. Yet, they are plainly inadequate when measured against the expectations and hope that made them come true in the first place.” He concludes with a remark that resonates with many observers today: “A magnificent society, admired by the entire world, has turned into an unpredictable mass that poses a danger to its own existence.”
Are there any reasons for hope?
Yes, says Matyniak. She believes that we need to revisit those from whom we have become distant during our “democratic transition”. Quoting Nadine Gordimer, the 1991 Nobel Prize laureate in literature from South Africa, who began one of her essays on apartheid with the line, “Men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other,” Matyniak suggests that Gordimer speaks of the solidarity we have lost—a vital treasure of democracy that we must rediscover.
She believes we must find our way back to the infrastructure of democracy, the mental scaffolding that once provided us with hope. Once we do, we will encounter new cohorts of actors, emerging in diverse colours. These will be the new keepers of the flame, whose actions will protect and enhance the potential of the liberal democratic imagination that can still guide our aspirations and dreams in this age.
I share Jerzy Szacki's sentiment, as he concludes his essay Polish Democracy: Dreams and Reality, stating: “I will not prophesy further, for I cling to the hope that our lot is to suffer uncertainty, but not hopelessness.” There is indeed much uncertainty, but not hopelessness; this democracy is not history quite yet.
* Dr Vusi Shongwe works in the Department of Arts and Culture in KwaZulu-Natal and writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media or IOL.