The Semantic Challenges of Defending Democracy Today
While democracy surely continues to have its haters, in the modern world its most powerful enemies have often claimed to love it.
Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump himself—each in their own way loves “democracy” so much that they are committed to using the power of the state to silence, marginalize, or eliminate those individuals and groups who stand in the way of their anti-liberal visions of “national greatness” and “popular sovereignty.”
We liberal democrats thus face challenges that are at once political and rhetorical, for we must contend with forces who have become quite good at casting us as the “enemies of the people.”
That the autocrats of our world often sing the praises of democracy has long been known.
Back in 1911, Roberto Michels observed in his classic Political Parties that:
our age has destroyed once for all the ancient and rigid forms of aristocracy, has destroyed them, at least, in certain important regions of political constitutional life. Even conservatism at times assumed a democratic form. Before the assault of the democratic masses it has long since abandoned its primitive aspect, and loves to change its disguise. . . In an era of democracy, ethics constitute a weapon which everyone can employ. . . Today, all the factors of public life speak and struggle in the name of the people, of. the community at large. The government and rebels against the government, kings and the party-leaders, tyrants by the grace of God and usurpers, rabid idealists and calculating self-seekers, all are ‘the people,’ and all declare that in their actions they merely fulfil the will of the nation. Thus, in the modern life of the classes and of the nations, moral considerations have become an accessory, a necessary fiction.
The subsequent history of 20th century world politics bore this out, as different versions of “totalitarian democracy,” lauded by Carl Schmitt and despised by Jacob Talmon, vied for power on the world stage, claiming to represent “the people’s will,” whether this be described as a “Volk state,” a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat,” or a “people’s democracy.” As Jan-Werner Mueller noted in his important Contesting Democracy, such regimes “were not democracies by any stretch.” They were, indeed, profoundly hostile to modern liberal democracy, and deeply authoritarian, oppressive, and brutal. But they nonetheless “played on the register of democratic values” and “promised fully to realize values commonly associated with democracy.”
After 1989, it was possible to declare, as Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl did in Journal of Democracy, that: “The wave of transitions away from autocratic rule. . . has produced a welcome convergence towards a common definition of democracy. Everywhere there has been a silent abandonment of dubious adjectives like ‘popular,’ ‘guided,’ ‘bourgeois,’ and ‘formal’ to modify ‘democracy.’ At the same time, a remarkable consensus has emerged concerning the minimal conditions that polities must meet in order to merit the prestigious appellation ‘democratic.’” But this consensus about “democracy without adjectives” was always questionable and, rather short-lived, it has recently been eviscerated by the rise of a new generation of authoritarian populists extolling “democracy,” whether it be “sovereign democracy” or “managed democracy” (Putin), “illiberal democracy” (Orban, Erdogan, Modi), or “people’s democracy” (Xi).
U.S. Republicans currently restricting voting rights and seeking in other ways to “Orbanify U.S. politics” claim to be defending “election security” and “American democracy” from nefarious enemies. Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro, who back in 2019 declared that “democracy and liberty exist only when your armed forces want them to,” similarly claims to be the guardian of the will of the Brazilian people and the defender of their democracy. When his Defense Minister insisted last month that “Today, the country needs to be united against any type of institutional destabilization initiative that changes the balance between the powers and harms Brazil's prosperity” and that it is “necessary to respect the democratic rite and the project chosen by the majority of Brazilians," the “institutional destabilization initiative” he rejected was the efforts of the political opposition to challenge his government. And “the democratic rite” he extolled was Bolsonaro’s supposed popular mandate to intimidate, marginalize, and silence his critics.
Such efforts recall Bertolt Brecht’s much-quoted poem “The Solution,” a biting satire of the East German Democratic Republic’s 1953 suppression of protesting workers:
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer’s Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
The appeal of authoritarian and repressive leaders and regimes to democratic legitimacy is a serious matter, and the sources of this appeal must be understood at the same time that it is challenged.
Such a challenge is now playing out in Myanmar, where the late January military coup overturning the 2020 electoral victory of the National League for Democracy has engendered massive civil resistance, and where the military’s increasingly violent suppression of popular protest has thrust the country into a veritable civil war (see here and here).
It is easy for us liberal democrats to condemn the military government’s brutality, repressiveness, and authoritarianism, and to support those currently defending democracy in the streets, villages, and forests of Myanmar. And it is necessary to do this.
But it is also necessary to appreciate the complex semantics of democracy in play. For, as Michels noted, “In an era of democracy, ethics constitute a weapon which everyone can employ.”
The Burmese military has for decades employed this weapon, claiming to be the guardians of the people’s freedom, and extolling a so-called “disciplined democracy” or “discipline-flourishing democracy that combined multi-party elections with continued military domination of parliament, government, and society. While in 2015 and again in 2020 the military allowed the National League for Democracy, led by Nobel-laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, to compete in elections—constrained elections in which a quarter of parliamentary seats are reserved for the military and in which the elected government is subject to numerous constitutional constraints—last November’s second landslide victory for the NLD led the military to seize power on the grounds that the election was essentially stolen—a claim disputed by all independent election monitors. The justification: to “protect democracy,” and promote greater “election security,” so that another election, one more authentically “democratic,” can supposedly take place in the coming year.
In the meantime, these so-called guardians of the Burmese people can murder political opponents and seek the arrest of the leaders of alternative parties, including the NLD; detain, torture, and kill dissenting intellectuals; and otherwise retore the “flourishing discipline” that will prevent substantial challenges to military authority should another election be held. All in the name of “democracy.”
The claim is disingenuous, hypocritical, and murderous. It is bogus.
But only to a point.
For in the Burmese context, as in most contexts, the very meaning of “democracy” is complex and contested, as Tamas Wells explains in his “Narrative and elucidating the concept of democracy: the case of Myanmar’s activists and democratic leaders,” published in 2019 the political science journal Democratization. Drawing on the ethnographic approach developed in Frederic Schaffer’s Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (2000), Wells argues that there are “three prominent and diverging narratives of democracy within and around the [Myanmar democratic] movement: a liberal narrative, centring on liberal democratic institutions and values, a benevolence narrative, focusing on the value of moral leadership and selflessness, and an equality narrative, highlighting the importance of cultural reform towards greater relational equality.”
The “benevolence” narrative draws heavily on Buddhist traditions, and valorizes the quasi-aristocratic leadership of selfless and well-meaning elites who oppose corruption and promote traditional conceptions of dignity. As Wells points out, it is this narrative that best captures the charismatic legitimacy that Aung San Suu Kyi—the daughter of the founding family of modern Burma—long has claimed. Wells also points out that it is this narrative that “both reacts against, and overlaps with, the Burmese military’s notion of ‘disciplined democracy.’” This helps us to understand tacit alliance with the military through which the National League for Democracy governed Myanmar between 2015-2020, an alliance that kept in place a highly attenuated form of democracy that had many of the features of “electoral autocracy,” and that sustained substantial economic and ethnic inequalities and indeed supported a campaign of brutal suppression against non-Burman ethnic minorities. Many observers have noted this ideological overlap between Suu Kyi and her military tormentors. Back in 2019, Burmese democratic activist and intellectual Khin Zaw Win wrote about “Twin authoritarianisms in Myanmar,” arguing that:
The illiberal turn in a number of Southeast Asian countries, while being aimed at maintaining and expanding a party’s grip on state power, has been accompanied by intolerance, discrimination, repression and outright violence against what is essentially pluralism. The ruling National League for Democracy party in Myanmar has only token ethnic minority representation and none of its lawmakers are Muslim. Opposition parties, dissenting media and civil society are facing severe threats from incumbent establishments. Institutions of the dominant religion are taking on a bigger role in politics—sometimes in tandem or in collusion with the state. The primacy of the vote over that of the gun was regained at great cost. But now it means that political leaders are pandering more to interests of race and religion to get votes.
. . . What Aung San Su Kyi and Senior General Min Aung Hlaing have in common is the determination to concentrate power in themselves and to close decision-making. There are strengths and weaknesses to this. It could bring success as well as failure. Myanmar’s present case inclines towards the latter. And fortune isn’t exactly smiling on either of them now. At the same time, both have strong survival and self-perpetuation instincts, and they have the organizational machinery to this end. The NLD for one will use all means at its disposal to win the next elections. Myanmar’s political leadership is characterized by hierarchy, gerontocracy, and its reactionary nature. Post-2015 this seems to have become even more marked. The two leaders are also in their sunset years, and the best thing they could do now is to acknowledge reality and think about the legacy they shall leave behind.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in the months and weeks leading up to last November’s election, many democrats organized against both the military leadership and against the NLD, believing them to be complicit in a corrupt system, and believing them both to be insufficiently democratic.
Some of these democratic oppositionists subscribe to what Wells generally calls the “equality” narrative of democracy, placing priority on challenges to either class inequality or the domination of ethnic Burmans and the marginalization of ethnic minorities. Proponents of “equality” narratives thus regard greater social justice, and the substantive policy changes that promote this, as prime criteria of democratization.
As Wells points out, only the proponents of the “liberal” narrative place front and center the advocacy of liberal democratic norms and institutions, and prioritize democratic procedures over any substantive outcomes. Wells links this narrative primarily with “international participants from Western aid agencies” and Western-based “democracy promotion” organizations. But while the transnational networks and norms that Wells highlights are surely important, it is clear that such networks are not reducible to Western financial and geopolitical interests, and that proponents of the liberal narrative include many local academics, professionals, NGOs, activists, and ordinary citizens.
Indeed, I invoke Well’s excellent piece here merely to highlight the complex meanings of “democracy” on the ground, wherever it is a political aspiration and a theme of political contestation. Wells is explicitly interested primarily in identifying three distinct ideal-typical “narratives” of democracy, and not in analyzing their sources of political support or the ways in which they interact, and combine, in the ongoing politics of Myanmar.
But the lesson to be drawn from his piece is an important one for understanding current contests over democracy, and current efforts to defend democracy against oppressive and authoritarian regimes: while in the face of autocracy a range of different ideals can be brought together under the banner of “democracy,” such concordances are always difficult, fragile, and precarious. It is a challenge to sustain them in the struggle against autocracy, and even more challenging to sustain a procedural framework capable of keeping the
very real differences in a productive and peaceful tension once the autocracy is forestalled. The post-communist history of Eastern Europe is painful evidence of this, as anti-communist leaders like Viktor Orban and Jarosław Kaczyński, who once allied with liberal democrats under the banner of “democracy,” have now turned on former allies, still in the name of “democracy.”
Those of us who are liberal democrats place a priority on the development and continuation of such procedural norms and frameworks. We believe that without such norms and frameworks, political conflict always risks devolving into anarchy or authoritarianism. We have good reasons to believe this. But whether in Myanmar or Brazil or Turkey or Hungary or the U.S., we should recognize that the challenges are at once political and semantic. We face autocratic parties, governments, and regimes that claim a kind of populist democratic legitimacy, and that force us to work hard to explain how their democratic appeal is fraudulent. But we also collaborate with allies who join with us beneath the banner of democracy to oppose the autocrats, but who often mean by “democracy” something very different than what we mean. Being clear about these differences can help us understand the power and the limits of our democratic alliances. It can also help us to work harder to promote the kind of pluralist democracy that can incorporate different shades of “democratic” meaning in a productive and non-tyrannical tension.
The Democracy Seminar—the web platform on which this essay appears along with many other essays, and the “world-wide committee of correspondence” to which it is linked—is such an effort, to promote a wide-ranging discussion about the rhetorical and political challenges facing liberal democrats today and the most effective ways of meeting these challenges, in word and in deed.